blog.

Everybody knows the value of social networking these days, right? Any commercial organisation worth its salt will have a social media strategy in place, and be falling over themselves to implement and update it. (There's nothing sadder than a neglected Twitter feed or blog).

But how do you keep track of all your followers? How can you measure the effect - the buzz - created by all your hard efforts and updates? Simple. Addictomatic.

Branded with the strapline 'inhale the web', Addictomatic does just that. Whether for ego searches or general interest, Addictomatic 'listens' to the web, seeking out your search term, and delivers you real time results from Twitter, blog posts, YouTube and news articles. You're left with a snapshot profile of exactly what the web thinks of any given topic at any given time.

Now Addictomatic is not the only provider to offer this service. Google has recently launched its real time search, and while it is largely limited to search results returned from news sites currently, in theory it has the ability to monitor social networking sites too.

The beauty of Addictomatic is that you can personalise your page, moving, editing and deleting areas as necessary. Save it to your favourites and there you have it - a real time snapshot of what everyone on the web has to say about any given topic. With the season of Easter upon us, I searched for 'master chocolatiers' Lindt, and came up with all sorts, from recommended outlets to stories of those who'd been 'saved' by the chocolate.

Fun stuff, if a little addictive!

Last month I was privileged enough to have the opportunity to spend a day with the RNIB (Royal National Institute of Blind People) super-accessibility-squad, or SAS for short, and blown away by how much information can be picked up in just a day.

I was in the "Working through WCAG 2.0" day-long workshop, and I would recommend it to anyone who would like to work out some of the differences between the old and new Website Accessibility Guidelines, and/or learn some up-to-date best practises on attempting to meet these guidelines.

My experience was made even better because I was able to sit next to someone who only coded using screen-reading technology, and was therefore able to gain an insight into a level of accessibility know-how that I could not have gained any other way.

I was interested in the realistic approach taken by the RNIB. Whilst they have every right to scream and shout about the unbelievable amount of inaccessible material out there on and off the web, they instead pointed out the small things that you can quickly change to make a big difference to all of your users. This was the least that a user should expect from a website, allowing us all to progress into more complex issues with a good understanding of the standards expected by the RNIB.

Another interesting idea was that by trying to meet all AAA Priority guidelines in WCAG 2.0 could in fact exclude more users than aiming to meet the AA Priority guidelines and only a few but well chosen guidelines from AAA Priority! Obviously this is determined by the user group, but it was an interesting point that could only be really made by the experts!

Hopefully I've sung their praises enough, so please have a look for yourself as I would recommend this course to small and big companies alike, because this is the way web best-practise is definitely taking us.

Course details: http://www.rnib.org.uk/..../work_through_WCAG_2.0.aspx
Related article: http://www.rnib.org.uk/professionals/..../uk_law.aspx

On Monday, the entirety of the Swedish top-level domain (.se) went offline, apparently after a script failed to add a single terminating dot to a DNS configuration file.

This took every website ending in .se offline, and meant that no-one could deliver email to .se addresses.

The problem persisted for around an hour, but unfortunately DNS entries are cached around the globe for performance reasons, which means that some people would have had problems lasting up to 24 hours.

There are just over 900,000 domains on the .se top level domain, and all of these would have been affected. Whilst that is a very large number, it's easy for UK-based observers to downplay the seriousness of the incident, as it's likely to have affected a small number of UK businesses and individuals directly.

Imagine the effects of a similar problem hitting .uk domains, where over 7,000,000 domains are registered - or even .com domains, of which there are over 80,000,000.

For the most part, the DNS system is an oft-forgotten piece of the internet puzzle; it tends to work, so it's easy to forget that pretty much everything comes to a resounding halt if DNS does.

The provider of the Swedish .se addresses says it's holding an internal investigation to find the cause of the faulty software update. Let us hope that the alarm bells ring enough for other registrars to cross their Ts and dot their DNS correctly.

Links:
http://www.iis.se/en/2009/10/13/felaktig-dns-information/
http://royal.pingdom.com/2009/10/13/sweden%E2%80%99s-internet-broken-by-dns-mistake/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Name_System