Phil Leggetter - Software Consultant » Internet

Wikipedia now has a definition for Real-Time Web

Phil Leggetter — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 14:43:23 +0000

A while ago a wrote a blog article called What is the real-time Web?. At this time (19/04/2009) even Wikipedia did not have a definition for what “real-time web” was. It does now.

The definition is short and sweet:

Real-time web is the concept of searching for and finding information online as it is produced. Advancements in web search technology coupled with growing use of social media enable online activities to be queried as they occur.

A traditional web search crawls and indexes web pages periodically, returning results based on relevance to the search query. The real time web delivers the most popular topics recently discussed or posted by users. The content is often “soft” in that it is based on the social web – people’s opinions, attitudes, thoughts and interests – as opposed to hard news or facts.

At present there is no mention of the technology behind the real-time web. Nothing about Twitter and FriendFeed helping to form the definition.

Do you agree with this definition? What web 2.0 platforms do you think have helped define what “real-time web” is? What technologies do you believe have pushed the “real-time web” into such prominence?

Microsoft Bing.com round table thoughts

Phil Leggetter — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 19:07:02 +0000

A couple of days ago I blogged that I was going to attend a Microsoft bing round table. I’ve now attended and here are the key points and interesting facts that I took from the event. You can also search for #meetbing on twitter for relevant tweets.

Bing.com is a re-brand of Live Search

And Microsoft openly admitted this. Basically Live Search wasn’t getting any traction so Microsoft had to do something (see my next point).

“Microsoft believe they will provide as relevant search results as Google in the UK in a number of months #meetbing” @leggetter

What they’ve done is go with a “web 2.0 name” of “Bing” to try and jazz things up a little. They’ve also gone back to basics and want to concentrate on the quality and relevance of search results and believe they will provide as relevant results as Google in a few months and are judging the quality of their results on something called NDCG. I certainly didn’t use Live Search because I found the results pretty useless. Bing definitely returns better results than Live did. An example on this focus on quality is that Bing has only presently indexed around 10 Billion pages which in the scheme of things isn’t very much.

“Only 1 in 4 searches deliver a successful result. Data from MSN search, tool bar in IE. Could be searching Google, yahoo etc.” @karenblakeman

Microsoft also believe they’ve improved the UX a bit to allow users to refine their search results with the introduction of the quick tabs/suggested links in a menu on the left hand side of the user interface. They’ve done this because they believe that only 1 in 4 searches deliver a successful result so this allows users to more easily find things faster.

Microsoft seem to think the re-branding and basic search tweaks have worked as they showed us data that they believe proves Bing has overtaken Yahoo! as No.2 in the search market. Their source of data to determine where users were going to perform their web search was quite interesting. Their source was the MSN toolbar which is only available to those with Internet Explorer. I guess since IE still has a large share of the market (W3Schools Stats | Wikipedia Stats) that the figures are more or less correct but some people at the event did question this as a suitable source.

The other thing that Microsoft are doing is to integrate Bing as a “search brand” into all their products in the same way that Google integrate Google search into Gmail, Google Docs etc. So, you will now see “Bing” used to power Hotmail search and most probably all other Microsoft sites or web applications over time.

Microsoft tried to buy Yahoo! to become No.2 in search

“Microsoft tried to buy Yahoo to become No.2 in search. Fact admitted here” @leggetter

This may not be a big surprise to some people but I didn’t know that this was Microsoft’s main motivation to buy Yahoo! and I did read a few articles about the attempted purchase. Microsoft admitted that Yahoo! had the No.2 slot and if they bought them they would gain this position in addition to a well-known brand. They also admitted that they may have kept the Yahoo! brand for their search and ditched Live altogether.

Bing UK is in Beta. Bing US is not

Bing UK is lacking a lot of the functionality of Bing US since it’s still in beta. Microsoft wanted to launch Bing and felt it was better to do it world wide so stuck with the beta. Bing UK will move out of Beta when more of the functionality you can see in the US is available in the UK.

Only the standard verticals are being targeted

Local, travel, maps, videos, shopping and news will be the verticals that Microsoft initially target. This is a little disappointing as it would be great to see Microsoft break the mould and do something innovative. The only unique vertical that was mentioned is that a music search function is being worked on by the Bing China team.

All in all I thought it was a worthwhile exercise by Microsoft to tell people what they are doing and gather a number of opinions. The consensus of the people at the event is that Bing is going to have to something different to take a significant portion of people away from Google and their current offering doesn’t offer too much to do this.

I’m simply happy that Microsoft have upped their game and will at least have Google looking over their shoulders albiet way back into the distance. Hopefully this competition will provoke innovation in search that has been generally stagnent for the past few years up until the introduction of the real-time web. Maybe this could be something that Microsoft could excel at?

Click here to view all the #meetbing tweets

Bing.com round table

Phil Leggetter — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 09:56:53 +0000

On Monday between 19:00 and 21:00 I’m going to a Bing roundtable (round table) in London. The event is being organise by Colin Mercer and is described as:

a small round-table event to discuss Bing and since we saw your recent tweet regarding comparative search results between Bing and Google, we thought that you might be interested in coming along. The idea would be to get your initial thoughts and you’ll get an update on the future steps for Bing which are being developed specifically for the UK. During the session you’ll have the chance to talk with Microsoft representatives and other people from social media like yourself, who have expressed some early opinion.

It would appear the event is being attended by a number of web 2.0, social media, marketing and internet types.

Phil Bradley: Phil is interested in Internet searching, Web 2.0 resources, search engines and their development. Phil has confirmed. I recommend following Phil Bradley on Twitter.
James Barlow: James Barlow is an independent consultant specialising in information technology and project/programme management.
Tom Warren: I don’t have any additional information on Tom.
Chris Hambly: Chris lists himself as a successful Digital Media Entrepreneur
Josh Russell: Josh has tweeted that he’s going. He provides micro-consulting on web application strategy
David Stuart: David is going. David blog provides thoughts of a Web 2.0 research fellow on all things in the technological sphere that capture his interest.
Karen Blakeman: Karen’s blogs about search tools, Internet technologies and resources for business information. Karen has confirmed.
Neil Robinson: Neil describes himself as passionate about using the right technology to drive business forward.
Kevin Harrington: Looks like Kevin had some initial trouble confirming his attendance but I think he’s coming now.
Mark Sharp: Mark designs and runs a number of websites for myself and for other people and organisations
Andrea Giammarchi: Andrea’s profile says JavaScript Ninja and both PHP/ECMAScript Certified Engineer

We are being encouraged to “live blog” the event.

Please come armed with all of your thoughts, opinions and questions for the Bing team. This meet-up is about everyone getting the chance to have their say. We’ll make sure you’re able to live blog during the event

So, I’ll be armed with my laptop (for tweeting) and HTC Touch Pro (for video, if appropriate) and will try and ask as many questions as possible and get as much information out to the real-time web as I can. My personal angle will be one of technology. For example:

How Bing are pushing use of the Bing API and Bing developer centre.
What are they doing to ensure information is available to the real-time web as quickly as possible.

Please let me know if you have any questions that you’d like asked and I’ll do my best to ask them. You can do this in a number of ways. During the event the hashtag in use will be #meetbing. Prior to the event I’d suggest people maybe use #askbing. Failing that you can contact me directly or leave a comment on this blog post.

Caplin Systems Blog Post – What is the real-time web?

Phil Leggetter — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 15:27:40 +0000

About a week ago I wrote a blog article at work entitled “What is the real-time web?“. I’m seeing even more tweets and posts about the real-time web and I’d love to hear if other people agree with my opinion on what the real-time web is.

View the What is the real-time web? article here.

How to make a cross domain web request with SilverLight 2

Phil Leggetter — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 12:16:18 +0000

To make a cross domain web request with SilverLight 2 really isn’t that tough. I did have some problems with RC0 but I have no idea why. I just tried writing a little app to do this and it worked straight away.

Here’s the code. It’s obviously part of a full solution containing a Web Application and a SilverLight Application project. I’ve also uploaded it.

Useful Information:

You can not do a cross domain request over HTTPS.
You can do a cross domain request over HTTP.
To be able to make the cross domain request the server that you are making the request to needs to have either (requires clarification) crossdomain.xml and/or clientaccesspolicy.xml in the root of the webserver.

Resources/links:

SilverLight.net forum post on making a WCF cross domain request
Cross domain policy file helpers for Visual Studio – addes intellisense for the XML files
Online cross domain policy file checker
Silverlight cross domain web request example solution
Example clientpolicy.xml file
Example clientaccesspolicy.xml file

The code:

private void RequestButton_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
    try
    {
        // Create and being making the request/getting the response
        HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(new Uri("http://www.leggetter.co.uk/"));
        request.BeginGetResponse(HandleResponse, request);
    }
    catch (Exception ex)
    {
        Debug.WriteLine(ex);
    }
}

private void HandleResponse(IAsyncResult result)
{
    try
    {
        // Finish getting the response and then read the response in chunks
        HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)result.AsyncState;
        HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse)request.EndGetResponse(result);

        StringBuilder readText = new StringBuilder();
        using (Stream responseStream = response.GetResponseStream())
        {
            byte[] buffer = new byte[1024];
            int read = responseStream.Read(buffer, 0, buffer.Length);
            while (read > 0)
            {
                readText.Append(Encoding.UTF8.GetString(buffer, 0, read));
                read = responseStream.Read(buffer, 0, buffer.Length);
            }
        }

        // Display the response text
        Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(delegate()
        {
            ResponseText.Text = readText.ToString();
        });
    }
    catch (Exception ex)
    {
        Debug.WriteLine(ex);
    }
}

Google Chrome Nightly Downloader

Phil Leggetter — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 18:16:39 +0000

Here’s a link to a very useful tool that’ll download the latest Google Chrome (well Chromium) nightly build. I decided to use this due to the vertical scrolling issue with Google Chrome that was driving me mad. The bug was present in the release of Google Chrome but fixed in the nightly builds.

Chromium Nightly Downloader

Update: 02/10/2008

I’ve been looking into getting SilverLight to work with Google Chrome or Chromium and came across a post about something called Chrome Channel Switcher which looks like it automatically updates your Chrome install to either Beta or Development builds. Could be useful! There are links directly to the executable download from Jon Galloway’s blog post.

A new look for Google

Phil Leggetter — Thu, 17 May 2007 08:15:32 +0000

Google is slowly moving away from its simple basic colour look to a new – but still simple – Web 2.0 look.

I first noticed this in my Apps for your domain but not they’ve moved the look to the main google site and search results.

If I’m honest I kind of like the old style slightly better but at least the new interface is still clean and fresh.

Still not sure? Have a nosey at a the Google changes comparison.

Report problems to your council with Neighbourhood Fix It

Phil Leggetter — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 12:30:25 +0000

Rob of GIS Consultancy fame recently sent me a link to a website dedicated to tracking and fixing of neighbourhood problems. The Neighbourhood Fix It website is a great idea and it actually works. I reported the dumping of a load of newspapers and leaflets outside of our flat that were just waiting to be set on fire. That same day the Edinburgh “Rapid Response Team” had been out and picked up the papers and leaflets.

Neighbourhood Fix It must have a mapping of post codes to councils and automatically inform the council of any reports in their jurisdiction. The site has been developed by mySociety who aim to “give people simple, tangible benefits in the civic and community aspects of their lives”. I think that Neighbourhood Fix It is a great piece of work and a great example.

Read more on the launch of Neighbourhood Fix It.

England Goals

Phil Leggetter — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 09:04:16 +0000

With the reasonable success of Bring Back Beckham! I decided to push forward with my next project. The idea behind England Goals was to create a site that lists all the goals scored by the England football team and use the increase in the number of goals that can be found on external video sites to my advantage by embedding these user uploaded videos as content.

I’ve owned the EnglandGoals.co.uk and EnglandGoals.com domains for quite a while now and without having any real content on them the EnglandGoals.com site ranks towards the top of the most search engines for the term “england goals” [Google england goals | Yahoo! england goals | MSN england goals].

The main problem now is getting content in the site so I need to try to encourage visitors to submit their favourite goals to the site rather than having to trawl You Tube or Google Video for the goals myself. I may need to incentivise this in some way. Maybe allowing the user who submits the goals to have a link to their own site next to their video submission. This way they will have the chance of users being driven to their site.

Why not visit England Goals and let me know what you think?

Bring Back Beckham!

Bring Back Beckham!

Phil Leggetter — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 11:46:12 +0000

Back in October 2006 I had an idea for a website. I tend to come up with a variety of ideas for things, most of which I add a .com to the end of. This time my idea was based around the fact that the England football team were in terrible form having drawn 0-0 with Macedonia and that Steve McClaren, the England manager, was refusing to pick England’s, and the world’s, most recognised footballer, David Beckham.

McClaren’s reasons, in my opinion, were not footballing ones. McClaren wanted to make an impact and stamp his authority on the England football team; what better way than to drop the previous captain! In addition he wanted to remove himself from the previous era under Sven-Goran Eriksson, where he was assistant, and therefore the dropping of Beckham was his was of saying that the failings of the team under Sven were not his fault but were more on Beckham’s shoulders.

N.B. I think it’s probably worth mentioning that I don’t think that McClaren is a terrible manager. Nor do I think that he deserve to get any form of abuse, which occasionally turns up in the Bring Back Beckham! Your comments section of the site. I simply disagree with him dropping Beckham from the England squad as I feel he had no real reason to do so and that Beckham deserves a place in the squad at the least.

The idea behind the website was simple; get David Beckham recalled to the England squad. So, i quickly snapped up http://www.recallbeckham.com and started creating my website. The idea behind it was to get people to sign a kind-of-petition and leave comments stating that they wanted Beckham recalled to the England squad for the Euro 2008 qualifiers. On the way to watch the Croatia v England game in a pub (Wednesday October 11 2006) my girlfriend commented that “Bring Back Beckham” was much catchier so I phoned my friend James who runs FrozenWeb and asked him to register http://www.bringbackbeckham.com for me. England went on to play terribly and lose 2 – 0.

I spent that night sprucing the site up and the next day, Thursday, I started getting a few hits. I also got an e-mail from a guy congratulating me on getting the http://www.bringbackbeckham.com domain and asking me what plans I had for it. As the website hits increased I started to realise that the site could really take off so I e-mailed The Sun newspaper to ask them if they’d be interested in putting something on their site or in the newspaper about my site. Indeed I got a mention in both the Friday and Saturday editions of the paper and also on a couple of online articles:

In addition to mentions in The Sun I also got asked to do an interview with Talk Sport, interview with Radio Lincolnshire and mentions in various other articles in print and online including a mention in The Times and an interview with Gainsborough Today (I was born in Gainsborough).

By Sunday October 15th 2006, 4 days after registering the website, the Bring Back Beckham! website had been hit over 30,000 times.

Beckham has yet to win his deserved recall but was very close just recently when he was unfortunately injured. The site continues to get a reasonable amount of daily hits which spike whenever Beckham is in the news. However, I’m confident that Beckham’s day will come and when he smacks home one of his trademark freekicks he’ll pull the famous Three Lions over his head revealing a Bring Back Beckham! T-Shirt in way of thanks to the campaign that helped him get his recall…okay, the T-Shirt thing won’t happen but it would bring a smile to my face!