Looking over the route before I set off, the journey seemed simple enough. All I had to do was continue on the road round Ullswater, then keep going until I take a “slight right ontto Kirkstone Pass”, which would take me straight to Ambleside. The instructions could hardly be more benign.

But what the vast off-white expanses of the default view on Google Maps don’t show is just how hilly this area is. I knew I would be driving between hills, so I should have guessed. This was almost too much for my poor wee Panda to cope with. It hadn’t struggled like this since I drove up to the car park at Cairn Gorm last year.

Even more worrying was the road sign that basically instructs you not to drive on Kirkstone Pass during winter. Moreover, the sign called the road “The Struggle”. I was beginning to doubt whether I should take this route, or follow the alternative, longer, but presumably easier road.

Luckily, I was travelling downhill. I can imagine that taking the road in the other direction truly would be a struggle, as the gradient is apparently 25% at some points of this extraordinary road.

My eyes will have been on stalks as I made the descent. There was no risk of me disobeying the signs advising to use a low gear. It’s difficult to imagine how this narrow, twisty, and exceptionally steep road could have been more challenging — especially as I was not expecting it.

It was a bit scary, but also brilliant fun to drive. I very rarely derive pleasure from road driving. For me, driving is a function necessary to get from A to B and not much more; about as fun as washing the dishes. But the Struggle gave me a taste of how it feels to really have fun on the roads.

Google+ is another attempt to take on Facebook. The twist is that this time it might work. It threatens to buck the trend of gaffe-prone Google product launches. People are actually excited about it. I’m excited about it. And I can’t remember when I last felt excited about a social media offering.

Google have obviously spent a lot of time and effort on making sure that Google+ works. A big emphasis has been placed on the user interface, with changes being rolled out across all of Google’s major products.

Circles

On that front, the biggest head-turner has been Google Circles. There is nothing particularly revolutionary at all about the concept. You separate people into different groups, meaning that you can share certain information with your close friends while keeping it hidden from occasional acquaintances.

Facebook has had this feature for as long as I can remember. But it’s never been sexy. Google has realised that people are attracted by flashy and playful interfaces as much as (or even more than) interfaces that are merely functional.

I was initially not impressed by the idea. But I have found that I have created many more circles than lists in Facebook. In Facebook I only have two — ‘Close friends’ (which I don’t particularly use) and ‘Limited profile’ which hides certain profile information from certain people.

But on Google+, I now have separate circles for six groups of people, with the intention of creating more. At the time being it is difficult to tell if the Circles feature will be useful in a way that Facebook’s lists feature isn’t.

A relatively clean slate

But what really strikes me about Google+ is the fact that its main selling point is that it’s not Facebook. Most are focusing on the privacy aspect of this. I am not sure if Google is less of a worry than Facebook on the privacy front.

But where Google has the upper hand is on its image. Over the years, Facebook has built up a lot of baggage. Facebook is now a massive deal with complicated systems of etiquette. Look at how people (only half jokingly) talk about relationships only becoming ‘official’ when your relationship status is set on Facebook.

For this sort of reason, Facebook has become a minefield. I often think twice about adding someone on Facebook just because of all the baggage that comes with it. Some people might take offence. Do they want to be Facebook friends with me? I am never sure. Which pretty much means that I add almost no-one these days.

Google Circles has a major advantage, in that it doesn’t come with all of this baggage. Moreover, it cleverly avoids calling everyone friends. When I signed up, by default I had circles called Friends, Family, Acquaintances and Following (for people I have never met but whose posts I find interesting).

The crucial inclusion of the Following circle means I can feel more comfortable about adding people. Already it is starting to feel more like Twitter or Tumblr in terms of the people that are on there, but with the functionality of Facebook.

Partly this is because, for the time being, Google+ is mainly full of the geeky types that I only know online anyway. Time will tell if Facebook users and more ‘real life’ friends will join Google+. But for me, it is a massively good sign that I have already happily added a number of people to my Google Circles, some of whom I would not consider adding on Facebook.

The other features

This is where it starts to unravel a bit for me. Beyond Circles, which is more about a change in culture rather than any revolutionary new features, I am not sure what else about Google+ is exciting.

I have tried, but I just do not understand Google Sparks. What is it for? It seems like a really bad version of Google News or Google Alerts.

Meanwhile, Hangouts looks like it could be fun, but probably not for me. Out of curiosity, I tried it out on my netbook, which has built-in the only webcam I own. But it seemed like Hangouts almost killed it! Admittedly, my netbook is a bit old and is creaking at the seams, but it wasn’t the best of experiences.

What’s to come

Overall, though, the most exciting thing about Google+ is that it heralds a change in direction for Google. It sounds like there is more in the pipeline and that they are intent on shaking up the social web. Circles is a great start.

If you happen to want to, you can add me on Google+.

I have been interested in the Domesday project for a while. The idea that a snapshot of Britain was taken, in the form of maps, photographs and text. Yet, the data was unavailable to most people.

The Domesday project was as much an ambitious experiment with technology as anything else. The technology was just about available, but a lot of pioneering work had to be done, and the hardware required for it was prohibitively expensive, leaving many of the contributors somewhat miffed.

Since then, it has become one of the most famous examples of digital obsolesence. This was due to a combination of the technology required to read the discs becoming increasingly rare, and idiosyncratic code.

The Domesday project came at a time when the technology was available, but the standards were not yet there to make it stable enough for long-term preservation, or even easy access in the short term. It’s a reminder that digital technologies are hugely enabling, yet frighteningly fragile.

Then there are the copyright issues surrounding both the content and the technology.

Joys of browsing Domesday Reloaded

The BBC should be applauded for finally managing to open up some of the data to the public on the web. The Domesday project was created before the web was invented. This isn’t how the content was designed to be viewed, so navigation is a bit cumbersome.

But aside from this gripe, the Domesday Reloaded website is turning out to be a fascinating resource.

I was born in 1986, the same year in which the Domesday project disc was published. So the Britain described here is a place that I don’t remember. But enough of it is familiar for it to feel incredibly relevant to me. It’s almost like being given a little upgrade to my memory, so that I can have snippets of knowledge from just before I was born.

Take the photographs for D-block GB-328000-690000 — the centre of Kirkcaldy, my hometown (D-block being one of the 4km by 3km areas the UK was divided into). It took me a little while to recognise “Kirkcaldy’s busy High Street”. But once I spotted British Home Stores, I was right there.

Yet, despite the familiarity, it is almost a completely different world. My memory of the High Street before it was pedestrianised is very limited. But it is just within touching distance of my memory for me to feel a strong connection with it.

The text entries are also fascinating. Most of the contributions were provided by primary schools. A decision was taken by the Domesday project not to edit the contributions, so the quality and style of writing varies from area to area.

As such, what strikes me the most is that it informs you as much about the prejudices of the school pupils and their teachers as it does about the area. It also retains their poor spelling and strange grammar.

For instance, an entry from Dundee (D-block GB-336000-732000) called ‘Traffic in and out’ is a basic survey of vehicles travelling on a road, with guesses as to where the vehicles are going and why. It lacks the academic rigour you would ideally want from a historical document.

But while some of the entries may seem banal, it was designed to be this way. The aim was to genuinely document society by capturing childrens’ curiosity with everything. This way it wouldn’t leave out what adults perceive as being obvious, when it wouldn’t necessarily be so obvious to someone in 1,000 years.

The really big shame is that not every part of Britain was documented. I could understand remote rural areas not being included. But sadly some highly populated areas have also been missed out. For instance, two D-blocks that cover the centre and east of Dundee lie blank, as does much of London.

But what exists is a joy. Even in the little amount of scanning I have done, I have already learned new information about the area I live in, which has set my mind racing and inspired me to investigate further.

Challenges for the modern day equivalents

What also struck me is how we actually already have readily-accessible modern-day equivalents of the Domesday project, almost by accident. The BBC is asking for users to update the content for D-blocks that were documented in 1986, to take an equivalent snapshot of 2011. I may go out and take some photographs for that.

But this sort of local information is staggeringly well documented already. We have Wikipedia, which can be edited by anyone but retains an academic approach that the Domesday project lacked. As such, it is a treasure trove of local information that can probably be relied on more.

Meanwhile, Google Earth and Google Maps provide masses of images of all corners of the country. It absolutely dwarfs what’s on Domesday Reloaded.

But the big question, which can’t be answered at the moment, is whether the wealth of information available on the web can be packaged up into a Domesday-style snapshot and preserved forever. The challenges of web preservation are massive.

Like the Domesday project, we could find the digital information almost slipping through our hands. The BBC know that themselves. With a stroke of a pen, it was decided that a significant chunk of British web heritage will be removed when the BBC removes some of its archived pages from the web.

Google has teamed up with some awesome organisations to offer budding young scientists some great prizes for coming up with neat ideas.

Along with Cern, Lego, National Geographic and Scientific American, Google is asking for people aged between 13 and 18 to submit their projects to the Google Global Science Fair. They describe it as “the world’s first online global science competition”.

The scheme also harnesses the power of the internet, with entrants being asked to submit their projects by building a website using Google Sites.

With some great prizes on offer, I would probably be tempted if I was eligible! And what a cool video too.

It is almost as if the circle or sphere has, by stealth, become the standard shape of the web. Because of the sort of person I am, I began to wonder just why this is. After a while, I figured that it was because a circle, or something vaguely spherical, reminds us of a globe, symbolising the ‘world wide’ nature of the web.

None of the logos go out of their way to look like a globe though. The most globe-like is the Firefox logo, and even then it is a made-up map that is mostly obscured by the fox. The Safari logo also features, quite subliminally, part of a world map. But this takes a back seat to the compass.

As many will remember, a globe was a big feature of the Internet Explorer logo about ten years ago. It was the big ‘e’ that rotated to reveal a globe on the other side while a page was loading. But nowadays the only throwback to that is the yellow ring, which looks a bit like an orbital path.

Goodness knows what the Google Chrome logo is actually supposed to be (a gay pride pokéball?). But the spherical nature of it is quite a strong reminder of a globe.

I have been thinking lately about good visual metaphors for the web. I am not particularly keen on the image we currently use in the University of St Andrews web team for the avatar of our Twitter account @stawebteam. I think it looks too much like we are forcing Firefox down people’s throats. The question is how to differentiate our Twitter account from others that use the University crest.

A spider’s web doesn’t work — it is cheesy, laboured and just a bit too obvious. The original world wide web logo (on the right), designed by Tim Berners-Lee’s co-conspirator Robert Cailliau, has not aged well and is not particularly versatile.

Maybe the answer is just to somehow adopt the sphere. What I wonder is if going spherical was a conscious decision on the part of the browser logos’ designers — and it is a sheer coincidence that they have all had the same idea. Or perhaps it is something that sits subconsciously in the back of a designer’s head when thinking about the world wide web.

An alternative theory is that the logos are designed not to look like a globe, but to look like the Internet Explorer logo! While having a look to see if anyone had spotted the trend for browser logos to be circular or spherical, I came across another blog post with more theories as to why.

In the comments there, momentum gathers behind the idea that the other browsers are following what Internet Explorer has done because it has become so ingrained in people’s minds that you click the circular logo to surf the web. I particularly like the first comment from Simon:

People got used to the idea that the icon that goes to the internet is the round, blue one, so other browser-makers followed suit with at least the shape.

In fact, looking at the logos again, I think it goes even further than the shape. Many of the logos feature blue prominently. Even Google Chrome’s multi-coloured logo places a blue sphere centre stage.

Perhaps this is the real reason why Opera has never quite got much of a foothold in the desktop browser market! Its logo is arguably the least spherical, and is the only one of the current major browsers that doesn’t feature any blue.

I have been blogging since 2002, when I was just 16. Over the years, it has been my favourite means of communicating online — more than Facebook or Twitter. More than IM and perhaps even email.

But increasingly I find myself becoming tired of it. Partly, this is due to that pesky “real life” nonsense taking over. As I make the transition from school pupil to student bum to full time worker, I have less and less spare time to dedicate to blogging.

The problem is exacerbated by the fact that I am trying to run three blogs at once (the others being Scottish Roundup and vee8). In addition, I have started to write for other websites and have begun to dabble with podcasting.

Blogging is not what it once was

There have been many changes in the nature of blogging since 2002 as well. The emergence of other tools like social networks, microblogs and tumblelogs has encroached on territory that blogging used to inhabit.

In 2002, blogs were the best (or only) way to interact with friends online. It was pre-MySpace, never mind Facebook. Back then, blogs were a good way to publish snippets of transient, inconsequential thoughts — to get stuff off your chest. Now, Twitter is ideal for that. For those who feel too constrained by the 140 character limit, you can always set up a tumblelog.

But now that these new tools exist, blogging has been forced to become a medium where you publish more in-depth thoughts. Without a doubt, I update this blog much less often than I used to. In 2004, I published 880 posts. This year I might just about get above 100. But five years ago many of my posts were extremely short. Now, to justify even touching my blog, I feel like I have to produce an essay.

There is also the fact that I posted a lot of nonsense when I was younger, whereas now I have to be more responsible with the way I update my blog. I need to come across well, which means I have to quite carefully consider everything I publish.

In short, blogging is now hard work, whereas beforehand it was just good fun. None of this is news. But today, a couple of things have again focused my attention on blogging.

Where are the new readers?

Firstly, Jeff at SNP Tactical Voting wrote a post announcing “the death of blogging“. He senses a general malaise in the blogosphere. According to him, there are few new readers. Moreover, some big Scottish blogging names have hung up their keyboards in the past few months.

In response to Jeff, I would say that I don’t think a year has gone by when a big name hasn’t given up blogging. But blogging life goes on. While I am not happy to have seen the likes of Scottish Unionist and Malc in the Burgh close down their blogs, and others dramatically decrease the frequency of their updates, blogging is not about who the big names are. It is about the conversation between bloggers.

Jeff may well be right that there are fewer new readers though. In terms of statistics, the best days of this blog are certainly long gone. Visitor numbers peaked in 2006 and 2007, and have steadily declined since. This is in stark contrast to the early years, when readership grew seemingly exponentially, as though it were viral. In fairness, you should expect this if you publish much less, as I do. I doubt the same applies to Jeff though.

Twitter increases in authority

Perhaps more ominous in terms of the value of this blog is not the fact that readers appear to be losing interest, but the revelation that Google appears to view my Twitter account as more authoritative.

It hadn’t occurred to me before to check what the PageRank of my Twitter account might be. I assumed it would be low. But having read, via Andrew Hayes, an article about PageRank and Twitter, I decided to check.

I was astonished to find that my Twitter account apparently has a PageRank of 5. In comparison, this blog today has a PageRank of 3 (a shadow of what it used to be).

Of course, it is probably wise not to focus much on the importance of PageRank. Google itself increasingly plays down the role of PageRank. Of course, that hasn’t stopped them from using PageRank as a means of publicly “bitch-slapping” websites that it views as threatening its advertising revenues gaming its search engine.

PageRank is the one small window provided to webmasters who want to see what Google really thinks about their websites. For my Twitter account to be clearly rated higher in this way than my blog has come as a surprise. I am not even the most prolific of Twitter users.

So is the blogging era over? I couldn’t have articulated this in 140 characters or less. But if few people are going to read it anyway, and if even Google doesn’t care so much, it makes me wonder what the point is any more.

An hour or so of my evening has been poured into writing this post. Soon I will have even fewer spare hours to spend on blogging. I persevere with blogging because I think it is, in a way, important. But if Twitter is easier (which it undoubtedly is) and has more impact (which apparently now it does), is there much point in continuing?

Charged debate

A series of posts

1. Are newspapers ready to charge for online content?
2. How charging for online content might work

Rupert Murdoch’s decision to experiment with charging for content has ruffled a few feathers. Fair play to Murdoch for being brave enough to put his head above the parapet. If anyone can take the risk, it’s Murdoch — and the rest of the media will have him to thank if the gamble pays off and it reveals the business model that other outlets can follow. Malcolm Coles certainly makes a fairly good case to suggest that Murdoch can get away with it.

Without doubt, monetising content online has been a very tough nut to crack, so much so that many appear almost to have given up. Indeed, the controversy surrounding Murdoch’s decision shows just how much some people now believe that it is impossible to charge for content.

No doubt the advent of the web has changed the game. It is much more difficult to charge for something that doesn’t physically exist, and something which can very easily be distributed for almost zero cost. This more or less means that, if you want to, you can probably get it for free.

I know of one major national newspaper that found that having a paywall was detrimental to their business because they made more money by removing the paywall and instead displaying Google ads to the extra readers. Anyone who has used Google ads will know that we are talking about pretty low amounts here. It is a real demonstration that a simple subscription model will not work for everyone.

But we know that there are plenty of people who are willing to pay for content. As Malcolm Coles points out, there are countless examples of people paying for music, audiobooks and whatever else, when they could have got it for free. That is because, contrary to what many people assume, most humans have a conscience.

For instance, the pay-what-you-like or “honesty box” model actually seems to work. There is the example popularised by Freakonomics about the bagel man. Radiohead seemed to make it work when they released In Rainbows.

Just last week I heard an interview with a taxi driver from Vermont, USA who invites all of his customers to pay what they like. “Nobody has shortchanged me yet,” he says. Even in cases where cash payment was not forthcoming, payment in the form of CDs was.

The problem is, you won’t be able to charge anyone anything if you only serve up a pile of samey crap. Your product needs to be distinctive. The bagel man wouldn’t have done so well if he was trying to sell pens. Radiohead made it work because they are the best band in the world with a loyal fanbase.

But how many media outlets can offer something so attractive? The problem as I see it is not that you cannot monetise any content. The problem is that the content newspapers are producing just now is not the sort of content they can get away with charging for.

Jeff has suggested that there needs to be a sense of duty to buy newspapers, just like there is a sense of duty to vote. But people should only really pay for something that they value, otherwise inefficiencies will result.

If people still value newspapers, they should be willing to pay — and many still are. Most people would feel guilty otherwise, as the honesty box examples suggest. But the problem is that many people just don’t like newspapers any more, as is evident in the comments on Jeff’s post.

It is not as if there is anything wrong with the physical product, despite the jibe about newspapers being “dead trees”. I can imagine a parallel universe where the newspaper was invented after the internet, where the physical paper would be seen as a luxury item. You don’t have to be connected to the internet. You can fold it up and carry it about with you. You can scribble on it if you want to. You can frame it if you love it enough.

But the problem is with the content. With the advent of new technologies, newspapers have become much less useful to consumers. Once, newspapers were almost the only way to find out about the news. Today they are the slowest of many ways to find out the news.

How many times does a major story break late in the day? That story will be all over the breakfast radio and all over the 24 hour news channels. There will be countless reports about it on the internet, and to add insult to injury the bloggers will have had their say too. But if you want to read it in the newspaper, you will have to wait until tomorrow.

Maybe a major story doesn’t break so late very often. But even in these cases, the chances are that you have had ample chance to hear analysis about the front page stories on the radio or the television the night before. In essence, newspapers now do little more than peddle what is literally yesterday’s news.

Like the music industry, the newspaper industry’s mistake was to fail to adapt. They arrogantly assumed that they could carry on with the same template and tinker round the edges, fumbling around for a business model that would work.

Of course, most newspapers have websites these days. But if anything, that has exacerbated the problem. It has led to phenomena like churnalism, with journalists producing more and more content with fewer and fewer resources. As such, much of newspaper websites’ content is watered-down crap. Worse still, much of it is Digg-bait which has been SEOed to death.

That is the crux of the matter. The media is sullied, and journalism as a profession is held in contempt by much of the general public. No wonder people won’t pay for content — it’s not any good, and there is nothing to distinguish it from free alternatives. Why pay to read Telegraph Digg-bait when you can read BBC churnalism for free?

So is there a solution? Keep an eye out for my next article where I will put forward a few suggestions.

When I first bought the domain name for this blog, I considered buying the .com address. But I decided it was too expensive. I preferred doctorvee.net, but that was just as expensive as a .com address. In the end, a .co.uk address gives me a half-decent domain name for a pretty cheap price.

A while back I saw that someone had bought doctorvee.com. Perhaps egotistically, I suspected they had bought it in order to sell it to me for a sky-high price. Turns out it was this DJ bloke. I doubt anyone actually confuses me with him, but it was slightly disconcerting when I discovered that someone was using “my” moniker.

This is a pitfall of modern communications. There are far too many top-level domains floating about the place. I could have hoovered up .com, .net and whatever else. But there doesn’t seem to be much point when just buying a .co.uk does the job for a cheap price.

I’ve just got to come to terms with the fact that I’m not the only doctorvee in the world. On some popular websites — notably Skype, eBay and YouTube — the username ‘doctorvee’ had been taken before I got round to it. I originally stuck with ‘doctorvee’ as a result of a frantic search for an email address that wasn’t being used by anyone else. Of course, all the sensible ones had been taken.

Now that ‘doctorvee’ is, as it were, my brand, I sometimes feel the need to sign up to any web service that is invented just so that I can have doctorvee, just in case I need to use it. I bought duncanstephen.co.uk just so that I could have it. I’ve had it for over two years now, and only recently have I found something vaguely useful to do with it (basically I use it as a place to beg people to give me something resembling a job).

Recently I had to visit the websites of all the local councils in Scotland. In most cases it’s easy enough. Just Google the area and most of the time the first result will be what you’re looking for.

Not always though. There were a couple of near misses. For instance, searches for both Orkney and Shetland took me to tourism websites for those areas. I suppose that is understandable enough. More people are probably interested in tourist information than local government information for those areas. Even so, the council websites were not so far down the page on Google.

Try finding the website for the local authority in the Outer Hebrides though. Before reading on, try it. As I write, a Google search for ‘Outer Hebrides’ will not help you find it. I gave up after the fifth page.

It is a bit of an anomaly. For local government purposes, the group of islands is officially known as Na h-Eileanan Siar, but good luck finding someone south-west of Mallaig who actually calls it that. The official name change only came into effect from 1997.

The area is also well-known as the Western Isles, and funnily while Googling ‘Outer Hebrides’ will get you nowhere, ‘Western Isles’ will do the job no problem without you having to resort to typing in Gaelic.

The domain name is cne-siar.gov.uk. CNE-Siar being short for ‘Comhairle nan Eilean Siar’. But despite having a Gaelic web address, you are presented with a home page written in English, with little Gaelic to be seen.

Indeed, as far as I can tell, the amount of Gaelic content on the entire website is completely dwarfed by the amount of content in English. Even in the Gaelic homepage, almost all of the navigational links are in English, and to pages written in English.

I am sure that residents of the Outer Hebrides are all very aware of the name of their local authority. So in that sense you might wonder why it’s an issue. But what about people who don’t live there and don’t have the modicum of Gaelic required to remember the website address? The blurb on the home page is clearly aimed at the potential visitor to the Outer Hebrides, but thanks to its web address it can’t reach out to them as well as it might.

The name change happened in 1997. I wonder if today the name change would be less likely to happen because of SEO concerns, even with all the attempts to keep Gaelic alive.

The case of a language barrier is almost understandable though. I still struggle to understand why Clackmannanshire Council did not decide on an address such as clackmannanshire.gov.uk or even clacks.gov.uk. Instead, it is clacksweb.org.uk. It’s not even a .gov.uk address. What’s that all about?!

Once I phoned Fife Council and the guy on the other end told me to go to fifedirect.com to find all the information I needed. Aside from the dreadful customer service (what if I didn’t have easy access to the internet? Might that have been why I was phoning?), it was just plain wrong. fifedirect.com is occupied by a squatter. Perhaps he meant fifedirect.gov.uk.

It would be wrong to imagine this is a problem affecting government only. In the mid- to late-1990s, when many businesses were taking their first tentative steps onto the web, marketing departments ran amok, getting in the way of common sense. Instead of publicising a simple web address like [brand-name].com, web addresses were sometimes centred on the contemporary marketing campaign.

For instance, Boots spent years trying to encourage people to visit wellbeing.com. How are any customers supposed to remember that? Today, it redirects to boots.com. Much better.

To this day, B&Q’s web address is diy.com. I’m sure they’re very proud of the fact that they own diy.com, but does it not dilute the brand? Absurdly, B&Q’s website does not even mention the term ‘DIY’, except in reference to ‘diy.com’. Sensibly, bandq.co.uk redirects to diy.com, but bandq.com takes you nowhere.

All-in-all, what a minefield. There can be few things more important when setting up the website than getting a decent address for it. But it is surprisingly common for a decent website to be let down by a bad web address.

This seems quite unusual to me. To access these stats for my websites, I need to log in with a password. Surely most other people do for their websites as well. But for the most expensive website for an MSP, such basic security measures do not seem to be in place. When you consider the possibility that search logs may contain constituents’ sensitive information, it seems to be quite an oversight.

There is one upside though. This free access to Charlie Gordon’s stats does give us the ability to calculate just how much value for money the taxpayer is getting out of his website.

For those who missed it, last month the Scottish Parliament released MSPs’ expense claims. The Scottish Parliament website allows you to search for expense claims by category. One of the categories is ‘Website Costs’, giving us the ability to see just what MSPs are spending on their websites.

It made the news that Charlie Gordon’s website was the most expensive of all the MSPs — by a very long way. Duncan Cumming conducted a full analysis. Charlie Gordon claimed £12,822.62 in website costs for the financial year 2007–2008. The next largest claim was by John Wilson, who claimed £2,291.25 — less than a fifth of what Charlie Gordon claimed.

For what it’s worth, Charlie Gordon released a statement on his website. There is no permalink for it, so you will have to scroll down — it’s (erroneously) dated 23 January 2008. It says: “My website costs for 2007/08 were around £1,700; not £12,900 as stated erroneously on the Scottish Parliament’s website!”

The MSP claims that only 20% of the costs outlined by the Scottish Parliament went on the website itself, the rest being paid for “call handling”. It is worth pointing out that even if we take Charlie Gordon’s claims at face value, a £1,700 claim would still make his website the second most expensive MSP’s website.

Here are the full details of the expense claims as laid out by the Scottish Parliament:

Claim Month: November 2007
Payee: GMG SOLUTIONS
Amount: £1,709.38
Additional Info: ADMINISTRATION AND WEBSITE MAINTENANCE

Claim Month: October 2007
Payee: GMG SOLUTIONS
Amount: £1,441.61
Additional Info: ADMINISTRATION AND WEBSITE MAINTENANCE

Claim Month: November 2007
Payee: QUEENS PARK FC
Amount: £11.80

Claim Month: September 2007
Payee: GMG SOLUTIONS
Amount: £1,200.00
Additional Info: ADMINISTRATION AND WEBSITE MAINTENANCE

Claim Month: August 2007
Payee: GMG SOLUTIONS
Amount: £1,932.00

Claim Month: July 2007
Payee: QUEENS PARK FC
Amount: £11.80

Claim Month: June 2007
Payee: GMG SOLUTIONS
Amount: £1,152.00

Claim Month: July 2007
Payee: GMG SOLUTIONS
Amount: £1,032.00

Claim Month: April 2007
Payee: QUEENS PARK FC
Amount: £11.80

Claim Month: April 2007
Payee: GMG SOLUTIONS
Amount: £804.00

Claim Month: May 2007
Payee: GMG SOLUTIONS
Amount: £708.00

Claim Month: March 2008
Payee: GMG SOLUTIONS
Amount: £144.00

Claim Month: January 2008
Payee: GMG SOLUTIONS
Amount: £1,464.00

Claim Month: December 2007
Payee: GMG SOLUTIONS
Amount: £1,044.43

Claim Month: September 2007
Payee: QUEENS PARK FC
Amount: £11.80

The pongy whiff intensifies when you read the press reports which noted that GMG Solutions is in fact run by Charlie Gordon’s son, Gavin. As Heather from Idea15 noted, GMG Solutions “does not have a web site, a portfolio, or any basic contact information, and from that we can infer that they do not exist.”

Heather was none too impressed by the website:

It’s done in table layout, its base colour is flamingo pink, it uses Flash for basic navigation buttons, and it has 45 basic coding errors. Worryingly, there are no analytics counters or codes, which means the MSP neither knows nor cares why people might be reading his site.

Moreover, the poor design of the website means that it actually may be in breach of the Disability Discrimination Act.

As Heather pointed out, the navigation buttons are Flash files. This is totally unnecessary, limits web accessibility and makes it more difficult for Google and other search engines to find pages.

Indeed, Charlie Gordon’s stats show that in January 2009, while the home page accounted for 1,792 hits, the eight navigation buttons (which appear on every page of the website, not just the home page) accounted for an average of just 1,324 hits. This is a clear indication that many users are unable to properly navigate through the site. This could be easily diagnosed by a quick look at the statistics (as I have just done), yet no action has been taken to remedy it.

In fairness, there are plain text links at the bottom of the page. But why should users be made to scroll all the way to the bottom of each page just to navigate through the website? The plain text links should instead be at the top of the page, where the Flash buttons currently are.

Guess when people became interested in Charlie Gordon’s website?

January’s stats for Charlie Gordon’s website show a huge spike on 23 January, the day the expense claims were released. Traffic did not return to normal levels until the very end of the month, so I will look at the period 1 January 2009–22 January 2009.

Between those dates, Charlie Gordon’s website received an average of just 54.8 visits per day. The maximum was 80 visits on 5 January. The minimum was 0 visits, achieved on both 17 and 18 January. These are outliers, so I assume that the website was down on these days. So even with Charlie Gordon spending £13,000 £1,700 per year, he can not arrange a vaguely reliable service. Considering the website is supposed to be a valuable resource to his constituents, this is a poor show.

The statistics for the whole of December 2008 are not much better. The website received just 63.7 visits per day that month.

We don’t yet know what Charlie Gordon claimed in website expenses for January 2009 or December 2008. But we do know that his largest claim in one month for the 2007–2008 financial year was £1,932.00 in August 2007. The public also has access to his web stats for that month, allowing us to calculate just how much value for money his constituents are getting out of his website.

Charlie Gordon’s website received 561 visits throughout the month of August 2007. This translates to just 18.1 visits per day. It is worth remembering that all Webalizer stats include robots (i.e. non-human visitors) such as Googlebot. As such, all of these visitor statistics are generous estimates!

Making the calculation, we can see that Charlie Gordon spent £3.44 per visit on his website that month. Even if we accept Charlie Gordon’s assertion that the website costs were in fact 20% of what the Scottish Parliament lists, this is still 69p per visit to the website (including robots). This is quite simply extortionate.

For comparison, I will use the same methodology to analyse the costs of my websites. I actually make more money on my websites than I spend on them, but I understand that advertising may not be an option on a publicly funded MSP’s website. So I will look solely at the costs of running my websites. This, too, is slightly flawed because I don’t pay anyone any wages to maintain my websites. This is purely my blood, sweat and tears, and maybe MSPs are too busy to do that. It is, nonetheless, an interesting exercise that will bring Charlie Gordon’s figures into perspective.

For the month of December 2008 I paid £7.67 (and £1.50 of this was a charge for using my debit card) for webhosting to last me for that month. I ran six websites during that month. During that time, these websites received 75,849 visits in total according to the same Webalizer package. This translates to a cost of £0.0001 (one hundredth of a penny) per visit. This is infinitesimal compared to Charlie Gordon’s figure of £3.44 69p per visit.

Incidentally, figures provided by Webalizer are much larger than any figures provided by any other stats package which excludes robots. Google Analytics, for instance, counts only human visits. It says that my sites collectively received 11,184 visits during the month of December 2008. This is just 14.7% of the figure given to me by Webalizer.

Assuming Charlie Gordon receives the same ratio of robot visitors to human visitors as I do, this would give him just 2.7 visitors per day for August 2007. As Heather pointed out, there appear to be no analytics codes installed on Charlie Gordon’s website, so we’ll never know just how many visitors Charlie Gordon gets or got. But it really could be as few as three per day or less.

I am not an MSP who is providing a potentially vital public service to his constituents. Nor am I a professional web designer. Yet I manage to get many more visitors, and spend much less money. £1,700 per year for a website is, quite frankly, a rip off. Taxpayers would have every right to be furious — especially since the taxpayer seems to be less than attracted to his website.

I previously covered Charlie Gordon’s website on the Scotweb2 blog.

(Almost) 100 years of Woolworths

A series of posts

1. Woolworths: The curiously British US-based company
2. Woolworths as it was known and loved, and neglected
3. Woolworths: Childhood memories and adult gripes
4. It wasn’t just the credit crunch
5. The blunder of Woolworths
6. Identity crisis
7. The beginning of the end
8. The nasty side of human nature
9. Woolworths: Final thoughts and wrapping up
10. Woolworths rises from the ashes

I have felt very sad about the demise of Woolworths ever since the business began to unravel in front of my eyes around two months ago. I was not sad so much because of my job — I was planning on leaving after the Christmas period anyway. I was just sad to see Woolies go because I was genuinely fond of it as a shop.

I always quite liked the idea that I worked for Woolworths, which had been one of my favourite shops as a child. Kids loved Woolies. I heard a story from another store about a child who enquired to his mother, “Is this Woolies branch closing as well?” When she said they were all closing, the child burst into tears. When I was on the tills during the closing down sale, I heard another child say, “Don’t give us any change!”

My personal affection for Woolies is more surprising because there wasn’t even a branch in Kirkcaldy when I was growing up. There had been a branch at the east end of the High Street, but it had gone by the time I could have any memories of it. It was one of the branches that were sold off in the 1980s.

Today the building houses the Kirkcaldy Indoor Market. But is still very recognisable as a Woolworths, with that classic design of the entranceway that was used for so many Woolworths branches up and down the land.

In the 1990s, there was a small Entertainment-only branch of Woolworths in Kirkcaldy that was more or less in the centre of the High Street. But it closed long before I was old enough to have an interest in buying music, and I have no memory of being in the store at all. That unit has since been an Our Price, a Ponden Mill and latterly a bicycle shop which I think has now closed down.

No, my memories of Woolies came from nearby Glenrothes. I have relatives in Glenrothes, and we would frequently visit, often popping into Woolworths on the way back. When I was a child there was something magical about Woolworths. Maybe it was all the pic ‘n’ mix sweets that I was seldom allowed to buy. I still remember the quaint stickers that used to adorn the pic ‘n’ mix stands — “Please buy before you try” and messages like that.

I always used to wonder why Kirkcaldy didn’t have a Woolies store. It made Glenrothes seem like such a superior town. When I had my job interview at Woolworths, I was asked what I liked most about Woolworths. My answer spoke about how I thought Glenrothes was a better town than Kirkcaldy because it had a Woolies. It must have sounded like I was taking the piss, but it was true.

Woolies finally arrived back in Kirkcaldy in 1998, and it was a large store at that. It filled part of a huge unit that Tesco had recently vacated, having just bought Wm Low whose Kirkcaldy store was judged to be in a better location. From then on, Woolies was always a trusty destination particularly when I had to buy gifts. It is no surprise that Woolworths made most of its profits at Christmas, because in Kirkcaldy at least it was more or less the only place you could find a decent selection of chocolates.

Woolies was also unquestionably useful for other odds and ends. The problem was, you couldn’t always quite tell what odds and ends you would find there. Quite soon after I started working there I clocked that customers were frequently unsure about what Woolies actually sold. I was as well. Even after working there for two and a half years, I would still sometimes be stumped by a question a customer asked about the products we sold, and I would have to go on a wild goose chase to find out if we stocked it.

The store’s role as an events retailer also meant that the range would radically change throughout the year as a matter of routine. Cleverly, shelf space was reserved for seasonal goods. The cycle went from home stuff in January, to gardening in the spring, to back to school in summer, to Hallowe’en stuff in September and October, onto Christmas stuff from then onwards. Tough luck if you wanted to buy a bird feeder during winter though.

Woolworths made a name for itself as a place where you could buy bits and bobs. If you wanted to buy something but weren’t sure where to get it, you could pop into Woolies. This meant that people had an affection for Woolworths — it was that useful shop where you could get your bits and pieces.

But it was also deeply dangerous territory for a store to occupy. Customers would sometimes pin all their hopes on being able to find an obscure household object in Woolies — and would become angry if we didn’t sell it. Then, as widespread access to the internet became a reality, you no longer had to search for your obscure items in Woolies. You could just search Google for them instead.

Meanwhile, all too often people wouldn’t know what Woolworths actually did sell. I primarily worked on the stationery department, but before I worked at Woolies I doubt I would have been able to tell you that it sold stationery. I certainly wouldn’t have bought my stationery from there before I started working there. I shopped at Stationery Box or WH Smith for my ringbingers and refill pads instead.

The sheer variety of goods sold by Woolworths also meant that it had multiple rivals on the High Street, each of whom focussed on a niche that they could specialise in. HMV sold a better range of entertainment products. You could go to Dunelm Mill for your household goods. Around half a dozen phone shops surrounded our back door. There were at least two greetings cards shops a stone’s throw away. The Works had some art and craft stuff. Even for toys you could go to Argos. Apparently Wilkinson destroyed Woolies down south. And of course, Woolworths competed with the major supermarkets on almost everything.

It seemed as though Woolworths needed to bring a better focus to its product range. But at the same time, it was difficult to see which departments could be safely ditched. DIY-type stuff could have been a prime candidate, but at the same time there was nowhere else on the high street (certainly on Kirkcaldy High Street) where you could buy that sort of thing. Entertainment could have gone due to poor sales, but it propped up an important arm of the Woolworths business, Entertainment UK.

I thought it would have been a good idea for Woolworths to position itself as a shop for kids and their parents. That would have brought most Woolworths departments — confectionery, kids clothing, toys, even home goods — under a clearer focus. In a way, I think Woolies had already become that store, but it didn’t have the bravery to properly market itself as such.

It is too easy, though, to blame Woolworths’s demise on the eclecticism of its range. Analysts may have bemoaned the way Woolies stocked Monopoly boards under the same roof as screwdrivers. But that doesn’t explain why one of the healthiest stores on the High Street just now is Poundland, which is like a jumble sale in comparison to Woolies. Plus, the thesis is fundamentally incompatible with the never-ending rise of the supermarket.

My next and final post in the series will look at some of the blunders of Woolworths and what life as a Woolies employee was like in the final few months.