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Eagle-eyed staff here at Plusnet have spotted one of Google’s Streetview spycars mapping out the streets of Sheffield.  As reported in The Register, the car has been previously spotted in London, Edinburgh and Cardiff - there can no be no doubt of Google’s intention to add the UK into their Google Maps’ Streetview.

Anyone not familiar with Streetview might be surprised at how fast and easy it is to use.. and how much detail is shown. Perhaps it won’t be too long then before you can cruise up and down past Plusnet Towers from the comfort of your armchair.

P-j

Update: Be on the lookout for cars that look like this.

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Any readers following developments of Google Lively (you’d be hard-pressed not have noticed that we are with our PlusNet ‘Lively’ Towers) may find this article interesting. Two of the key players in the virtual worlds industry have published their opinions of Google’s foray into the scene on their personal blogs

Electric Sheep Company CEO Sibley Verbeck had this to say in his blog, “Lively requires the installation of a plug-in, which even the most enticing ad just won’t get that many mainstream users to install in order to interact with a brand on-line.”

What do you reckon? How off-putting is the the fact that you’ve got to install a plug-in just to have a dabble?

P-j

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Unlike Linden Labs’ Second Life here’s no ‘virtual economy’ here and the amount of customisation available is still fairly minimal (no user-generated objects can as yet be uploaded), but you can still have a lot of fun with Google’s new virtual ‘Lively’ worlds.

It’s free to download and install*, and pretty easy to get started with. You can embed your room into a webpage (see below) and even play YouTube videos on plasma TVs and movie screens (although that does get a bit tiresome after the second play-through).

So, created in 45 minutes whilst sat in the sunshine in the real world, here’s a virtual PlusNet Towers.. Come and say ‘Hi’ why don’t you?

P-j

* Windows only I’m afraid. And you’ll need to register a Google login if you’ve not already got one to get started.

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Last Friday, Google replaced their colourful upper-case ‘G’ icon with a more subtle lower-case ‘g’ icon. This has upset a lot of users who prefer the old one. Personally I don’t really mind but what I found interesting is that the change has really impacted my browsing. More…

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At PlusNet we’ve made a bunch of long videos (around 20mins each!) and it would really help to be able to place bookmarks within those videos so people can quickly jump to sections that interest them.

I’ve just had a brief look at the common video sharing websites (Vimeo, YouTube, DailyMotion, Google Video and Flickr’s new offering, but haven’t found any that support it.

This would be really useful!

Any one know any that support it?

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There’s been a lot of hype around Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo! and a fair mix of reactions from “Wow! I think they can give Google a good run for their money” to “I’m going to ditch my Yahoo! account if that happens”. So, where do you sit?

More…

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It wasn’t so long ago that Encyclopedia Britannica was the definitive source for information. Then came along the computer and Microsoft’s Encarta DVD version of the world. It had a big impact on Britannica’s business model and shrank the market considerably (I mean who would pay hundreds of pounds for the books when they could get a DVD for less than £30).

Then came Wikipedia. Wikipedia offered a free service with content written by the public and this caused major disruption again.

I dont have the detailed statistics but Wikipedia currently gets around 450 times the traffic as Encyclopedia Britannica.

So you would think that would be the end of it. I mean how can you compete with free?

Over the weekend Google announced GPedia. Their version of the Wikipedia, but this time they will pay contributors based on the advertising revenue generated on the pages holding their content. So again, Google tips the market dynamics on its head.

It will be interesting to see where this goes - and whether GPedia becomes as popular as Wikipedia, but when you own the search engine of choice and you can change the algorithms which point people to relevant sites it does make an interesting proposition.

What do you think of this proposal?

Dean

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You can tell the Internet has gone mainstream when the majority of people at Internet World are wearing Suits. and they want to tell you (for only £1k) how to get to No.1 on Google.

However, amongst the presentations that are nothing more than souped up adverts for their services, stand a couple of innovative businesses which really demonstrate the power of the Internet and how its revolutionising certain parts of the marketplace. Once such business is Lulu.com

Lulu.com has been around a while (its on version 20 (that twenty not two point oh! ) and has brought the printing press into the home study. It basically allows anyone who has written a book have it published in single copies and sell it through the marketplace on Lulu’s website. Read that last sentence again! You can write a book and have it published in printed format (so it actually looks just like a paperback that you bought from the high street retailers) in a volume of ONE.

So you really have no excuse in writing your autobiography now

This “print on demand” solution is a great example of technology empowering everyone in something that is as old as the written word in a new and exciting way.

regards

Dean

p.s. My feet really ache. Internet World needs more seats in the presentation areas and you don’t n.eed to spent a grand on getting to No.1 in Google listings you can do it yourself by following some simple techniques which I’ll write about shortly

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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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Hello folks. My name is Wojtek and I work as Web Designer in our PlusNet Production Team. I’d like to tell you a bit about one of our main targets for the upcoming months – SEO, which is nothing else but Search Engine Optimization.

New technologies and strategies – you’ve seen Broadband Your Way coming, and you are also experiencing simplified sign up journey for all our main products. But that’s not the end of the story; we’re experimenting with SEO now. Good search engine positioning is essential now; our Referral Model has proven itself to be very efficient, but today if you don’t exist in Google – you don’t exist at all. Simple as that. Type “broadband” into google.co.uk – and where will you find PlusNet? Well, let’s close our eyes and imagine that we’re somewhere on the top… Because we’re not. We want to change it and we will do it. There are some steps to achieve this.

First of all, our content needs to be optimized. And we’re working on that; there is a special group of people here – we call them Content Writers or “The Portal Pirates” (don’t ask why, as we don’t really know either The job of these folks is to sit and to write good, user-friendly and SEO optimized text. And they do their job pretty well, which you can see for yourself more and more with every single project delivery. Keywords, hypertext links connecting pages all together; pure, semantical structure and minor navigational tricks - this is a major improvement and it will be progressing even further. Our Support System, which is a core of our knowledge base looks even clearer and better with every day.

Secondly, our codebase is heading towards what I would call “half-way decent XHTML code”. XHTML and CSS are the technologies used for separating the visual layout from the content description level, and are replacements for old-fashioned table HTML. The major advantages of migration to these powerful hypertext solutions are better accessibility, faster rendering time for the webpages and – what is probably the most important – much better cross-browser availability. It is also affecting SEO a lot due to delivering simpler, semantically oriented data structure for the engines. Stuffing Google and friends with nested tables and image maps is not really what hardcore web coders and marketing gurus do We’re still far from the ideal, so forget W3C validation for example – but give us some time and somehow this monstrous codebase of our three portals will get optimized to deliver you much better user experience. Navigational structure is also being improved on the fly, so each move requires less clicks now, and our aim is to lower this number much further.

So, my dear friends, wait and you’ll see PlusNet raising from the depths of unknowing Our main target is clear: our name and products needs to be better known amongst the crowd. And they will. It’s just a matter of time!

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