Searching in the Societal Web

The ‘societal web’ is beginning to emerge.

Businesses are moving from telling to listening, from informing opinion to facilitating collaborative insight, from one to many and from mono-media to infinite-media. The challenge for us all during this transition will be on how we can continue to maintain our income streams and on how we can adapt to the changing world.

When the web first appeared it was ‘Read Only’ and businesses presented their products and services for people to browse. In our opinion we are heading to the development of sharing as a way of working, of collaborating, in a community environment, by all, for the benefit of that community. Those who gather around your ideas and subject matter become your society, your community, but they set the context and the culture, it’s no longer defined by the owner of the infrastructure.

This is the Societal Web.

How search is changingSearching on the Societal Web is becoming more sophisticated over time. The initial search engine developments through companies such as Google and Yahoo focused on providing a swift route to finding pre-existing content.

In Web 1.0 most sites were relatively static and were informational, in that they were intended to be read by those interested in the subject matter that they discussed. As Web 2.0 and the Societal Web develop and user-generated content became the norm, the volume of information and the extent of web pages changed dramatically. Progressively, websites have to be dynamic in order to be interesting.

Looking back or looking now;
In doing a conditional search using one of the search engines all the existing active web pages are available to be found, but some may be several years out of date. Whilst the search engines make efforts to ensure that new content is more strongly featured than old content where information is relatively unchanging (but one example of where things not changing is an indication of accuracy is Wikipedia ); such an approach may erroneously bring new but incorrect material to the top of a search engine list. These challenges have faced the search engines for some time.

User-generated content however has an immediacy about it. It’s reflecting what’s currently happening. Users of Twitter who understand the #hashtags can follow a particular event simply by tracking what individuals are saying using a particular hashtag. For sporting events and fast-moving news stories, it’s often as quick to follow what’s happening on Twitter using these facilities and their searches than it is to watch using traditional media and through the news.

There is, therefore, a move by both the search engines and Twitter and other similar social network sites to provide search that offers a means to access both historical knowledge and current activity. These changes are being integrated into the search engines including Google which now includes a number of options to allows you just to search, for example, content that’s been added to the web in the last week, or the last month, or the last year. That is still, of course, historic, and as Twitter moves to more real-time searching so the search engines on sites such as Twitter and Facebook and other Societal Web sites is having to cope with an ever growing volume of historical data in their databases.

Balance and Authority;
Between the two I think there is a balance and I suspect that searching will develop into three specific areas;

Firstly, searching the historic record looking for long-standing, unchanging, reliable authoritative articles that provide good background and factual information

Secondly, great real-time search looking at what people are talking about right now, primarily being used for news, current events, sports events and so on

In between, a combination of the two, the third option; looking at tying historic, authoritative data with current authoritative people

This is the most interesting area. Allowing search to look at who has provided good links to authoritative data and who is recognised by others as an authority in their area will enable the search engines and the Societal Web sites to tie good quality content, that meets the needs of the person searching, by relying on the authority of the people that have provided the links to that information in the past.

That’s a whole new area and it’s one that is only just beginning to emerge; we should watch it with interest.

William Buist is Managing Director of Abelard Management Services, which specialises in building trust in teams and communities within its corporate and SME client base.

You can hear more from William Buist on PASSION for the PLANET

The Internet; how to stop wasting time and increase productivity

Avoiding Staff Misuse and Spam

Spam or unsolicited emails is the biggest waste of business time today.

As defences have improved so has the cunning of the “Spammers”. Last year they embedded all messages inside pictures to avoid detection, but the latest spam tools read the text inside pictures.
So first and foremost guard your email address as you would your pin number. If you put your email address on your website, put it on as a picture or break up the email, for example “sales @ abbeysupport dot com”. Also use a hotmail or gmail address for anything you register for.


We originally started stopping spam with Microsoft’s free offering or GFI Mail essentials and these blocked between 20-75% of spam, reducing user annoyance. They only occasionally gave a false positive.

Nowadays we have moved many of our customers over to a hosted spam solution, where your emails pass through a server which receives over a million emails a day, compares their content and source and strips out 90-99% of spam. It also has the facility to send you one email digest a day of all the emails blocked just in case of false positives.
With the basic version you even get another Anti-Virus clean, for the basic price of £15 per user per year, with the real added bonus that your internet is quicker because its not downloading spam messages.

Points to remember:
1) consider a hosted spam cleaning service
2) Publish email addresses on your website as picture only
3) Use Gmail or Hotmail for all product registrations

Internet misuse by staff is another big problem for many businesses – it leads to loss of productivity, slower broadband speeds and higher risks of infection.

I am repeatedly asked by owners of businesses what can be done to stop staff wasting company time on the internet. Surprisingly perhaps my answer is always the same: make sure you have an HR policy in place saying what is considered acceptable internet use and what is not.

The second stage is to remove messenger applications such as MSN messenger and Yahoo messenger. Combining this with the blocking of major sites such as “youtube” and “facebook” will reduce internet traffic.

The final solution is a hardware device, most of you will have a Zyxel firewall and it is possible to get a subscription service that will block certain types of sites based. This costs around £100.00 a year.

If you need more control of who can access what sites when, then there are devices from around £1,000.00 which allow you to control access on a per user basis. You get reports on internet usage and can allow all users access at lunch time or outside core hours.

Points to remember:
1) Put an HR policy in place and publish it to your staff
2) Block messenger applications and social sites
3) Upgrade your firewall or purchase an Internet proxy device

Anthony Melbourne is the founder of IT software and hardware support company; Abbey Support

Count Your Mobile Blessings

We’re very lucky in the UK when it comes to mobile phones and the mobile Internet. You can pick up a Pay As You Go phone for a few pounds and it comes with credit already loaded. Sign up to a contract and you’ll be offered free laptops or iPods. Top up your phone and you’ll get even more credit – for free.

And the same can be said for mobile Internet – I recently purchased a T Mobile USB modem. It cost me £30 plus £2 per day for PAYG Internet access. All very straight forward, and if I’d been looking to renew my mobile contract, I would probably have got it for free.

So when I arrived in Vienna at the weekend I thought I’d buy myself a USB modem for use in Austria. I am here for a week in order to write my first book (which will be published by Hot Hive in the autumn). My mother has a lovely flat in the centre of town so members of the family are often here and Internet access would be handy.

My mother and I set off for the Mariahilfer Strasse (Vienna’s Oxford Street) on the hunt for mobile phone shops. As well as my USB modem we also wanted an Austrian SIM card so we could reach each other without calling via the UK.

Easy you’d think. Not so.

It took us over three hours, and an ice cream, to get it sorted.

Austrian’s don’t get the great deals we do when it comes to mobiles. Nor do they have the kind of choice we have.

A USB modem is the equivalent of £60, the minimum top up is £20 and you get one gigabyte (or two gigabytes if you sign up to the 3 Network) and you must top it up again within 12 months or you lose your credit, the modem stops working and you have to buy a brand new one!

A SIM card was £10 – no phone, just the SIM card. Again, if you don’t top it up within 12 months you lose any credit and the SIM will stop working, so you’ll lose that number.

The Austrians I spoke to couldn’t believe what a good deal we get in the UK and how free and easy the Telecoms companies are with SIMS, incentives and PAYG deals.

However there was one oddity that seemed better for the Austrians than us Brits. The USB modem I eventually bought from 3 will also work in the UK – for no extra cost. But, had I bought it in the UK, it would not work in Austria! Does that make sense?

All in all I feel very lucky – I live in a country with wonderfully cheap mobile deals AND I've got a USB modem for use here, which means I've been able to sit in the beauty of Schönbrunn and write my book.