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I’ll be in London for the next couple of days at Internet World.

If anyone wants to meet up for a beer or a chat - let me know via dean@plus.net and we’ll arrange something.

Remember, BarCamp Sheffield is on the weekend of May 26th / 27th 2007.  Information available here.

regards

Dean

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Back in February we increased the bandwidth available across our broadband subscriber base by introducing a 5th BT Central pipe (known as PlusNet 6) to the network.

Due to the response to our recent Broadband Your Way product launch and to allow for projected growth in signups and support existing customers moving to the new products, we are pleased to announce the lighting of the final 155Mb segment of this pipe.

When new capacity is added to the network, it takes time for the network to balance and for a representative proportion of the customer base to connect to the new segment. This is what we’ll be concentrating on over the coming days. Once balance is achieved we can look at focussing on the areas we feel with bring the best improvements to our customers’ Internet experience.

We frequently review our plans for the purchase of additional capacity and we’ll be continuing this trend moving forwards in line with projected customer numbers.

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In response to customer feedback we’ve now made a couple of updates to the web pages relating to expected broadband speeds

More…

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I’m currently sat in the Algarve nursing a hangover (one too many caprihina’s last night) on a wi-fi connected laptop about 12ft from my front door - overlooking the sea.

I have access to exactly the same digital world as if I were at home or at the office.  I can SSH onto any server I normally have access to by logging onto a single secure Linux server based back home.

I still get access to email via webmail.

I’m talking to friends and family through IM.

I’ve got access to all of my favourite web sites through bookmarking sites like del.icio.us

I can even watch my favourite TV programmes from my Sky or Freeview box back home through my Slingbox. Although strangely enough i’ve not managed to watch more than 5 mins of TV through it as the lure of the beach and those caprihina’s are just too much
I have however been listening to my favourite music through Pandora - the radio stations here a not quite to my liking.

When I eventually walk onto the beach and loose my Wi-Fi connection I have a Palm Treo 750v  to keep in touch with the outside world.  Its got GPRS, Email, Web Browser, Telnet etc..

The world is now so connected that it seems as though we can do just about anything from anywhere. Which begs the question.  When we are this connected - how is one supposed to disconnect and have a holiday?

Me - I’m going to do it the old fashioned way and turn them all off and leave them behind from now on.
Regards

Dean

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For those of you that post in the forums, be it regularly or occasionally, you may have seen a couple of new names of staff appearing.

Firstly there is me, Chris Parr, now the eagle eyed will have noticed that I was posting a few weeks ago too. That was on a month secondment to the Comms team in order to get a feel for the different roles within the business, well I’m back.
With James moving to BOT TSM it was decided that we needed someone with some sort of comms experience in order to help the usual suspects, so here I am, well for the time being anyway.

I’ve been at PlusNet just over 12 months starting as a member of customer support and then technical support. In previous employment I have worked as an e-commerce assistant for an online travel company and also many many other jobs which I won’t bore you with.

And also…..

I’m Chris Cotterill and this is my first week on the Comms team. I originally joined PlusNet back in October as a temp, after completing a degree in Business and Marketing and quickly progressed onto technical support. It was decided that another team member should be drafted in and I managed to convince Mark and James to give me a shot Hopefully with our experience of the CSC and a good understanding of how things work around here we should be able to offer further qualities to the comms role.

Hopefully you will get to know a bit more about us during our time in Comms and more importantly, we hope that we can help you guys out whenever a question needs answering or a problem needs solving

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Google, fresh from acquiring Doubleclick last week announced yesterday that it is acquiring Tonic Systems. Tonic produce a web based solution which enables the creation and delivery of presentation. This fits in nicely with their acquisition for the online word processor and online spreadsheet solutions and makes it all the more likely that a totally online “office” package is on its way.

There seems to be no stopping Google’s appetite for acquiring technology leaders in this space and promises to provide a

The tonic systems website is only showing an FAQ at the moment - and states its new Google offering will be launched in the summer. Watch this space.

Whats this mean for me?

We’ll more competition in the office space is always a good thing. It means that the major players (read Microsoft) have to continue to move the product line forward to ensure their is differentiation. It also means that not to far in the future we really will be able to operate online only
regards

Dean

Link to Google Announcement on their Blog 

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I was at the FOWD yesterday with Matt, Spence, Wojtek and Dean. It was great to see so many leaders in the field gathered in one place but it didn’t inspire me as much as FOWA back in February. There was too much Flash, graphics and animation for my liking. I would have preferred more down-to-earth design ideas.

Like Dean, I enjoyed the Adobe talk about Apollo. It’s gonna be cool to write proper programs without learning C++! Nat Hunter from Airside gave a great little talk about design across different media with reference to her work with Lemon Jelly for their CDs & live shows. Rei Inamoto from AKQA showed off some incredibly creative promotional work while tying it in with 5 sound design principles:

1. Have a point of view - being everything to everyone leaves you with nothing
2. Be who you are - don’t pretend to be someone that you’re not
3. Let them engage with you – give them something meaningful to do
4. Be relevant - prove yourself worthy in whatever medium you work with
5. Simplify Simplify Simplify

I would have liked to hear more from Ryan Singer of 37Signals who did a short and sweet talk on signup forms. We’ve greatly improved our signup process but there’s still room for further improvement. Another brilliant but sadly truncated talk came from Steve Pearce of Poke but as the end of the day grew near, much of what he said went in one ear and out the other… It made me laugh on the way though
All in all a very worthwhile exercise.

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This week’s seen some promising developments in our ongoing battle with SPAM. So much so that I thought it only worthy of a blog post.

Last Friday we rolled out a number of configuration changes to one of the 8 mxlast mail delivery servers on the email platform. This allowed us to assess the potential impact the changes would have before rolling them out across the remaining servers. For anyone who hasn’t read it, specific details regarding what these changes entailed can be found in the forum post here.

Anyway, analysis after the changes to this one server proved very promising and saw a massive reduction in the volume of spam being delivered. On the back of this the changes were rolled out across the entire mxlast platform early this week.

Now for the interesting bit. The following figures are from last Tuesday’s analysis of all the mxlast delivery servers…

5334997 emails were processed by the platform in total that day. Of these 2190584 were blocked by our existing ACL’s, which leaves 3144413 emails.

Whilst we would expect a proportion of the remaining emails to be rejected due to things like bad sender addresses or failure to resolve the sender’s host name to an IP address, they all have the potential to end up in customers’ mailboxes. If you bear in mind that most of the email on the secondary mail servers is spam then that’s is a hell of a lot of junk, most of which would normally have been destined for the customer
Here’s the good bit! Due to the changes we made on Monday 1979411 of these 3144413 emails were blocked and not delivered to customers. That’s a reduction of 62.95% in the volume of spam being delivered to customers from our secondary mail servers! This basically means that customers should notice a reduction in the volumes of spam email being delivered to their address.

Fantastic news I’m sure you’ll agree and and combined with the changes to the way in which mailboxes are configured that rolled live this morning, we’ll have seen a significant dent in the volume of nuisance email being delivered by the mail platform come the end of the week

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A current work in progress at PlusNet, Force9 and Free Online is to update our meta content on the pages, from an SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) point of view.

You’ll find that pretty much any site explaining or teaching SEO will mention page titles. Optimising your document title one of the simplest changes you can make to help your site achieve a better rank. It’s also one the most important factors in SEO, partly because it becomes the text that your searcher clicks on. This means a good title can increase click-through rate. It is also used to indicate whether your document content is relevant to the search performed by the user. More…

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I mentioned Microformats briefly when I blogged about OpenID previously.

I just wanted to touch on them again - as they are proving to be very useful in a number of situations. Imagine you have a webpage (such as the about us or contact us page on your site) with your name, address, email and telephone number on it. Right now your expecting the visitor to your site to copy and past them into their contacts / address book if the information is useful to them.

With microformats you “tag” the data to give it context. ie. You mark up in the HTML that the data is of type “email” or of type “name”. So now its able to be consumed as information and not just data.

Using a tool such as Operator which is a plug-in for Firefox any visitor to that site now knows there is information on that page of a certain type. ie. “Name” and “Email” and the plug-in allows your user to consume that data more easily and readily. ie. they can auto copy it into their outlook contacts or view your company address on a google map etc.

All nice / cool functionality.

However, real power can be derived from this type of solution when you start to enable a lot more data.

eg. Imagine having a web app generate a report which displays customers with name, address, total spend to date etc..

You can then use this technology to “mashup” the data results with google maps and get a view of where your customers are geographically located and when the “hot spots” are regarding your most revenue generating locations.

The possibilities for these “mashups” are endless.

The really interesting stuff though is that Operator is being developed by Mozilla (the people who brought us FireFox) and it doesn’t take a genius to see that sooner or later this type of technology will make it into the browser iteself (and not require the plugin) which then opens up a whole world of visually rich data display and content interaction.

Or what about if Adobe’s Apollo started to use Microformats - now that would be interesting.

If your in the web apps / development game - I would recommend taking a look at Microformats over the next couple of months.

regards

Dean

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