In 2012, “the cookie law” was implemented in the UK (it was actually a year earlier, but UK organisations were given a year’s grace period). I put in a ‘Freedom of Information’ request to the Information Commissioner’s office to see how they’re currently enforcing the law. Ashley Duffy (Lead Information Access Officer at the ICO) very […]
Google have been rolling out “Sitelinks Search Boxes” for many sites recently. These have existed for years, but on a very, very limited number of sites, and without any auto-complete functionality. These are useful from a user point of view but – something that has not been spoken about particularly – they also provide a […]
The Scotland referendum question is worded like this: “Should Scotland be an independent country?” As a result, the “Independent Scotland” campaigners are called the “Yes” camp, and those who want the UK to stay together are the “No” camp. I’ve heard it suggested quite a few times that this puts the ‘unionists’ at a fundamental disadvantage: […]
Here are the results of a poll run on a sample of Scottish web users between 7-9 September. The poll reported – when weighted to match the Scottish internet population’s general makeup – a 53.9% ‘Yes’ vote for the question “Should Scotland be an independent country?” The poll results were from 1,000 people in Scotland (for […]
Google Analytics is now recording Post Code data for visitors to websites across Europe. Rachel McCombie of Air Experiences was the first to spot the change. Here’s an example for the UK, where over the last few days roughly 5% of ‘city’ traffic has been recorded with a postal code rather than a city name […]
Here are the results of 2 surveys. The first is one that’s been run quite a lot by polling organisations over the last couple of years. The second one is much rarer. Here are the descriptions: Survey 1: A survey of 1,000 people in Scotland, carried out over the web, asking the simple quesiton “Should […]
Occasionally at the moment when you click a LinkedIn notification on your phone, the LinkedIn app opens and – before you’re taken to the notification – you’re presented with this screen: That looks fairly mundane at first glance. Often apps present you with information before taking you to wherever you were going. But… if you […]
In early 2013, Steve Lohr of the New York Times published an article where he tracked down the origin of the phrase “Big Data”. He found several different sources, and declared that it originated in the mid-1990s. But… he specifically opted to conclude that the very earliest source he could find – from 1989 – […]
When you visit BuzzFeed, they record lots of information about you. Most websites record some information. BuzzFeed record a whole ton. I’ll start with the fairly mundane stuff, and then move on to one example of some slightly more scary stuff. First: The Mundane Bits Here’s a snapshot of what BuzzFeed records when you land on a […]
On June 10th 2014, at 8am, Nominet (the UK domain registry) launched “.uk” domains. In other words, I could now move this site to “http://barker.uk” rather than “http://barker.co.uk”. To announce the launch – the biggest change to UK internet addresses in many, many years – Nominet have launched what they call “the world’s largest welcome sign”, […]