It’s taken exactly a year to go live but you can now see the Ormskirk campus on Google Street View.
The Hub is now open so maybe it’s time to get the trike back to take some new photos.
Have an explore and leave a comment if you see anything interesting!
A couple of weeks ago, Google announced that from 1 August 2011 they will be changing the way they support web browsers for their Google Apps products including Gmail. Their blog post gives a little more information:
For web applications to spring even farther ahead of traditional software, our teams need to make use of new capabilities available in modern browsers. For example, desktop notifications for Gmail and drag-and-drop file upload in Google Docs require advanced browsers that support HTML5. Older browsers just don’t have the chops to provide you with the same high-quality experience.
For this reason, soon Google Apps will only support modern browsers. Beginning August 1st, we’ll support the current and prior major release of Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari on a rolling basis. Each time a new version is released, we’ll begin supporting the update and stop supporting the third-oldest version.
As of August 1st, we will discontinue support for the following browsers and their predecessors: Firefox 3.5, Internet Explorer 7, and Safari 3. In these older browsers you may have trouble using certain features in Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, Google Docs and Google Sites, and eventually these apps may stop working entirely.
This came at an interesting time for us as we were readying to launch our new website design. We’ve been forced to make decisions about which browser versions to support and which to ditch. Unlike Google, we’re still supporting Internet Explorer 7, though some subtle design elements may not work, but we too have the problem of not being able to take advantage of features in more modern browsers.
IE7 is five years old yet is still being used by over 20% of visitors to GO. Some of these will be machines on campus and colleagues are working to upgrade these but others are beyond our direct control.
We will however no longer support IE6. Use of this is around 2.5% yet to develop for it would consume a disproportionate amount of time. It’s also 10 years old and even Microsoft want rid of it!
More generally we’ve seen use of Internet Explorer drop by around 15% since January 2010 while Chrome is up by 10% and Safari up by 4%. Firefox and Opera have both maintained their position.
The adoption of modern browsers is important for the web to keep developing. Just as things start to go wrong if you don’t service or MOT your car, when using an out of date web browser, not everything will function as designed and there are potential security risks too. So I’d encourage everyone to make sure they’re running the latest version of a browser – then we can start to innovate rather than always struggling to cater for the lowest denominator.
Yesterday I noticed Google’s latest incremental feature on their search results page. It’s not long since they launched full results search as you type and now highlighting a search result pops up a thumbnail preview of the page.
This means people will be able to judge the contents of a site before they even get there making it even more important that we make an impression, and now in a small image where text can’t be easily read.
It does however provide an opportunity to show that there is extra content if we were to push “below the fold”, that is make our homepage longer so that not all the content appeared without scrolling.
Technically it’s quite an interesting implementation. They’re using data URLs to put the image content into a single request and long pages are broken into several sections each up to 405 pixels high.
Back in March, Google added Ormskirk – and most of the rest of the country – to Google Street View. Today we were visited by the Google Street View trike to take imagery of the Ormskirk campus. Unlike roads which are photographed using a car, private property like university campuses and Disneyland Paris are photographed using a trike allowing them to get along footpaths.
Most of the campus was covered today in just an hour or so but it’ll be somewhere between a couple of weeks and six months until it’s live on the website. Until then you can check out a (very) short video of the trike on campus:
A few months ago I got a very curious phone call from Lawrence Grizzel, a producer for Punt PI on Radio 4. He was interested in doing an episode of the Steve Punt show about Argleton, the town that doesn’t exist that’s been covered to death on this blog for nearly three years!
The two of them were to travel up from London the following Friday and wanted “Mister” Roy Bayfield and I to show them the way to Argleton. How could I refuse? I rejigged some plans and worked out I could just make it back from Liverpool to the Stanley Arms in time to meet them.
The interview went fine – we led the way down the road to the field labelled “Argleton”, discussed how it was found and a couple of hypotheses with the landowner and Steve Punt then headed back to the Stanley to consume a pint of the specially brewed Argleton Ale.
The beer tasted a little like it hadn’t been allowed to settle and I’ve not seen it since so maybe it didn’t really exist.
The episode finally aired last Saturday and although I’m currently on holiday in Crete, I managed to listen again to the show.
It’s the first time I’ve heard the show and was pretty impressed. The show told the full story of Argleton from visiting the location to following up leads at the British Library, with cartography experts and even managed to secure an interview with Google and TeleAtlas.
It’s worth listening in, if only to hear my 15 seconds of fame but there’s a couple of interesting points. Firstly was the guy when asked “so computers can’t tell the difference between virtual and reality” responded “correct – do we?” and secondly the new information offered by Google and TeleAtlas. Namely that they can’t track down how Argleton (or Mawdesky or the other errors in West Lancashire) were added.
The cynic in me might suspect that their data source was slightly dubious but I’ve no proof.
Anyway, back to my bottle of Mythos and the barbecue!
A couple of weeks ago my Twitter Search alerts for “Ormskirk” picked up the following:
I was intrigued so searched Google Maps for “topshop near ormskirk” and sure enough, not one but two mystery Topshops were marked on the map.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/62172246@N00/4903870211/
Obviously this isn’t the case so why are Google showing them on the map? The addresses of the shops match Dorothy Perkins and Burtons – both other brands in Arcadia Group, owners of Topshop – but that doesn’t explain why they’re there. As with Argleton, it may well be another case of Google mining data from whatever sources they can get their hands on and forget the accuracy. I’ve reported the problem to Google, let’s see if they fix it.
Flickr recently started previewing their new photo pages. They’re quite nice but it does something that’s been driving me mad and I can’t work out how it’s doing it. It only happens in Google Chrome 5 and I’ve only seen it in a few places.
Take a look at this screen capture of Flickr’s new lightbox view. Note how the URL updates each time I click through to a new view. Nothing surprising there until you realise it’s not doing a full refresh of the page and is actually an Ajax call back to the server. (You may want to hit the full screen button, bottom right.)
Contrast that with what happens in Firefox – it’s still doing Ajax calls to make flicking between photos quick but the URL changes after the fragment
This technique is pretty common – Facebook have been using it for a couple of years and we even use it to give tabbed pages history on our site. It’s necessary because JavaScript isn’t allowed to set the full page URL without a page refresh, or at least that’s what I thought!
Google Maps has been doing the same as Flickr for a couple of months but I’ve still no idea how! Anyone care to read the Chromium source code or dig around Flickr’s JavaScript to see if there’s something different?
Update: also works in Safari, thanks Ross.
I was right – it took almost three years to arrive in Ormskirk, but this week Google launched Street View across most of the country including Ormskirk.
Argleton might have been wiped off the main Google map but it’s still there in Street View as you can see in the above Street View of Argleton Aughton Village Hall.
Edge Hill’s St Helens Road and Ruff Lane entrances are present but you can’t (yet!) look around the campus or Ormskirk Town Centre:
Strangely on Ruff Lane the section immediately past the entrance is missing. I don’t think this is a conspiracy, it’s more likely the route the Google Street View car took.
Post links to any interesting things you’ve found on Google Street View.
It’s that time of year where you have to post an annual wrap-up of the previous year’s posts.
Just sneaking into the top ten is Steve’s introduction to some of the ways to access email for users of the new Google powered email.
Sam introduces a summer’s worth of hard work (not so much from me – I was driving across America!)
A post from late 2008 writing up a presentation I gave at BarCamp Liverpool and repeated at IWMW 2009.
An attempt to balance out #2 in the list by taking a sideswipe at those who are maybe a little too addicted 
A write up of some of the early coverage of the Argleton meme.
Coming soon to a website or portal near you – still a few things to iron out but we hope you’ll like what we do.
Live on the set of the forthcoming TV advert and testing out the new Flip Camera we’ve got.
Everyone loves web stats, okay maybe it’s just me! Six months on and Internet Explorer has dropped to 76.9%, Firefox down a little to 13.5%, Opera has held steady while Webkit-based browsers, Safari and Chrome, have jumped to 5.6% and 3.6% respectively. Breaking down IE shows IE6 use continues to fall (down to under 11%) while IE8 usage has trebled. There’s hope for a standards-based-browser future yet!
Little did I know when I wrote this post that it would unleash such a debate! Ironically we’ve just had the 2’ of snow that benefitted Bath’s uptake so we’ll see whether usage grows!
And in at #1 is a little post I fired out about a typo on a map
As well as individual posts, a number of tag pages that rank pretty highly including “symfony”, “argleton”, “google maps”, “twiterdeck” and “facebook”.
It seems Argleton just won’t die! Late to the game behind the Ormskirk Advertiser, Mister Roy’s visit and my post about the village some 13 months ago, the Daily Telegraph yesterday revealed the mystery of Argleton, the ‘Google’ town that only exists online.
It’s a nice article with exclusive interviews from Joe Moran from LJMU and, of course, Roy Bayfield. They’ve also managed to get answers from Google and their data provider Tele Atlas. Google’s spokesman said:
“While the vast majority of this information is correct there are occasional errors. We’re constantly working to improve the quality and accuracy of the information available in Google Maps and appreciate our users’ feedback in helping us do so. People can report an issue to the data provider directly and this will be updated at a later date.”
Ah yes, report the fault… that’d be what we’ve done on several occasions without success and may be the reason why Google have decided to take corrections into their own – or more accurately the user’s own – hands. It seems that drawing the attention of a national newspaper has caused Tele Atlas to pull their finger out:
“Mistakes like this are not common, and I really can’t explain why these anomalies get into our database.”
Let’s try a bit harder, shall we… is it because there is no process for checking data before it’s added? Is it because you’ve chosen not to buy additional sources of data to verify against? Is it because your error reporting procedure is so poor that 13 months later it’s still in the database? No?
For Google, errors like these are annoying. They recently announced Google Maps Navigation for Android 2.0 offering turn-by-turn directions similar to Tom Tom and other devices but for free. Accuracy of maps and the ability to keep them up to date will be one of the big selling points.
But time may be nearly up for Argleton “A spokesman [for Tele Atlas] said it would now wipe the non-existent town from the map.”
Update: Mister Roy appeared on Radio 5live’s The Weekend News (starts at 25 minutes).