I’m working on a pretty important website and was wondering if it is timely to introduce some CSS3 and fancy fonts. A simple question on twitter turned into a very interesting stats session where many webmasters and tech boffins shared their browser stats. These are numbers from many of the most popular sites in Iceland.

Ingi Gauti stepped up and offered the stats from barnaland.is Icelandic equivalent of Craigslist come Mothers united.

Ingi also shared this brilliant screenshot where he politely points out to IE6 users that their browser is an 8 year old piece of crap.

Hugi followed suit and published data from the government road traffic directorate.

Hannes from TM Software offered stats from a “popular” Icelandic site. They run many of the main screen realestate in Iceland so it’s anyones guess which site he’s referring to.

Siggi Árni joined in with data from Landsbankinn.is one of the main banks in Iceland.

… and finally Rósa Stef gave us insight into two of her sites

All of this gathered on Twitter within a couple of hours.

Scientific summary concludes that we’re hovering around 1% IE6 usage in Iceland except that odd site from Rósa.

So I’m putting a nail in the coffin and stop testing this browser specifically. Of course everything will degrade gracefully and all that jazz, but I’m not wasting any more time on making things pixel perfect for this ancient fiend.

Who needs flying cars when you have an iPhone. I was doing 50km/hr on my bike when I got the idea for this blog.
My phone was dutifully tracking my bike ride home through GPS satellites and modern wizardry. It got me thinking about all the GEO data that I’m pushing through to the inteweb tubes and the drivers behind it.

So here goes…

Runkeeper

Runkeeper is a wonderful multi platform app that has captured the data nerd and is pushing me harder than any gym teacher during my school years. It is a wonderful website with all sorts of maps and stuff, but the key here is the iPhone app that does a brilliant job at tracking my cycling activities. I press go, put the phone in my backpack and cycle like a maniac knowing where I reach max speed and which time I need to beat. Now I know that I burn roughly the equivalent of a Guinness pint cycling to work. My main goal here is to maintain beer consumption while loosing the gut.

Here is an example report from today:

This app does a brilliant job of marrying web and phone and has smooth social features where I can compare my progress to the active geeks in my network.

Foursquare

You won’t get this one until you really try it yourself. Foursquare has cracked the GEO app space and captured an audience like no other company.

This video has some insight:

But for me it’s just a brilliant addictive game. I feel like I’m playing real world Monopoly while engaging in new ways with my network and discovering new places to eat. Heck, I try out new places just to collect badges. You can check out my profile here. But more interestingly, here is a Google map with my latest checkin history:

View Larger Map

I also recommend Fourwhere.com, it’s doing a pretty good job at mapping all the happening places in Reykjavik.

Twitter

A while back Twitter introduced GEO tagging for updates. So any updates I do from my phone are tagged and you can find out where I’m Tweeting from. Using the same trick as with Foursquare, you can take the RSS feed URL and paste it into the Google Maps search field to get something like this:

View Larger Map

Where am I going with all of this? Not sure, but you’ll be able to track me…
I guess the future is now and who needs a flying car when you have a good bike?

This was quite unfortunate cause the first site has been actively promoted in the media. Björk and friends are petitioning to stop the first deal where an Icelandic energy company is acquired by a foreign investor.

The unfortunate bit for Skýrr, a major hosting and IT provider in Iceland was when one of the spokes person for Orkuauðlindir suggested (Icelandic) that this might have been an attack or some sort of security breach.

The company responded (again in Icelandic) in the main online medium where the CEO stated that all computer systems are fragile and it’s not uncommon that they break down. He also left the conspiracy theory hanging, declining to comment on weather this was caused by some Magma hacker group…

It seems like system administrators and PR people where on holiday like the majority of Icelanders in July. The sites are back up, but I think Skýrr missed a trick there to neutralize the situation. You won’t find any explanation as to what happened on their site, facebook page nor twitter. Meanwhile my network of IT friends has been chatting about the potential causes and reasons on Twitter.

My thoughts are in this region as I recently stumbled upon an example where the UK Government had some issues with one of their crowdsourcing sites and this was their approach to keep people informed:

They used Twitter to feed updates as to what was causing the fail and when they expected it to be fixed.

This is what people have come to expect. I have actually been in the same scenario as Skýrr some years ago. A server at Íslenska vefstofan crashed and burned, taking many prominent websites offline for quite some time. Then we had the same approach but today I would have taken a different approach.

People expect more than a press release in cases like this. In addition to the traditional PR responses, I would follow these steps of action:

• Tell it like it is. Involve the techies and explain in layman terms what is causing the issue.
• Communicate the current status and next steps using any form of media available to you. In this case a post to the company site and facebook page and more frequent updates on Twitter might have been in order.
• Engage in conversations on social media channels to prevent guess work and conspiracy theories.

I hate cars. Stupid piece of scrap metal that starts breaking down the moment you fork out half your life savings to buy one. This post is however not a rant on the stagnated automobile industry but rather the glorious extent of my social network.

It seems like since the financial meltdown in Iceland, people have stopped abandoning their cars when they run out of gas and buy new ones. Mechanics will have to keep our cars running for the foreseeable future and seem to be struggling to keep up. Me thinking that I could just pop into some garage and have the family car fixed before the holidays, but no. Two week waiting time at the 3 shops that I could think off before my first cup of coffee this morning.

Time for some crowdsourcing.

As this was a very local problem, I decided to take it to my facebook crowd in Icelandic.

My first post was more of a rant really. But ended up in a conversation between the CEO and CTO of CCP, MD of Loftleiðir Icelandic and the equivalent  of Kevin Rose in Iceland (Helginn.net) ranting about the state of Iceland and the industry.

My second attempt was a shotgun tactic with updates both to facebook and twitter.

This time around my facebook family decided to point out the fact that half of my cousins are mechanics. Problem is that they tend to be just as busy, if not more when I call them. I used up most of my favors when trying to keep my cars running during the university years. Arney cleverly pointed out that Gulla is going mental over the state of our car.

Gyða saved the facebook crowd by posting her cousins garage facebook page with the comment that he was probably too busy but worth the try. But she is a super smart computer scientist, so she doesn’t count in this experiment.

So much for facebook, but my trusted network of Twitter friends had me sorted in no time. Three solid recommendations with URLs and personal contacts later, my car is going in tomorrow morning.

There is a lesson in there somewhere.

In all, I got about 15 responses to my cry for mechanic help. Most of the facebook stuff was rubbish. Twitter rocked, even got calls from people trying to help. All the good recommendations came from happy customers with URLs to their trusty companies.

…. so companies: Treat your clients well, have a solid presence online and be active on the social interwebs.

…. people: crowdsource the questions to life, universe and everything.

…. and check out Bíla Áttan, they squeezed me in and I’ll report on how it goes…. on Twitter.

If none of this makes sense, I apologize. My company Agora.is researching this heavily at the moment and I can’t think or blog about anything else.

I have been chatting to the guys at Clara for a while about making some kind of an index for Icelandic startup companies. I even have some wireframes for a CrunchBase style social network but it has been put on ice for now.

Brian Suda sent me this link where Josh Russel recently open sourced their Brighton Wifi map. So I set to work 2 hours ago and pulled in some resources to map the Icelandic startup scene.

The current map has the companies in the top of my mind and my fellow crowdsourcing followers on Twitter and Facebook. Hopefully more will follow suit and we’ll have this close to reality some day soon.

So check out the map of Icelandic Startup Companies and add to it if you find some missing. Who knows, you might have an investor at your door tomorrow!

I might buy a domain for this at some point…

Companies are realizing that there might be some value in a solid social media strategy while the Icelandic advertising agencies don’t seem to meet the demand.

Community managers are a scarce resource on our island but I’ve compiled a short list. Mainly to save some time when I need to pull the info next time.

It is an open spreadsheet for editing so feel free to add to it.

At the time of writing it contains:

During the last couple of months I have somehow managed to set up a dozen or so WordPress sites and I must say it is a breeze. So rather than hacking my dodgy Google App Engine blog I’m migrating over to this setup here.

I’m also trying out a new hosting partner that has managed to impress me with competitive pricing and outstanding service so far.

I managed do fudge my DNS settings but hopefully all will be good before the end of the weekend. It’s 3am now and I should really be fast asleep. Not tweaking this blog instance. Bah…

Þetta er fyrsti bankinn á Twitter og eitt af fyrstu fyrirtækjunum sem hlustar og svarar (augljóslega séð fyrirlesturinn minn)

Þetta fór af stað með smá skotum en mér finnst bankinn hafa staðið sig vel í að svara og dæmin tala bara sínu máli: (lesist bottom up)

No real surprises there, similar to the US except for the proportionally larger representation of 16-20 year olds.

The age distribution is similar to other countries but I expected a higher female proportion. Clickity click and numbers from theNational Registry shed some light. We have roughly 47% of the male population and 57% of the female population on Facebook

The numbers you get from Facebook are all rounded and rough estimates but still an interesting exercise. I published the Google Spreadsheet for those interested in taking this further.

Just the thought of having a social media task force in matching uniforms on a Hummer with a theme tune would be awesome. But having the Icelandic government actually consider it would be enough for now I guess. Here are some ideas we can nick from our friends from down under.

We have had some activity here in Iceland regarding Open Data and Creative Commons. We should outright copy the Mashup Australia competition.

After the National Assembly meeting I’ve been dreaming about something like the Gov 2.0 task force suggestion box for Iceland. Today I actually heard some rumors we might be seeing something similar soon from the grass roots. Having the Government involved would make it a valuable two way communication tool between the public and parliament.
The Australian task force has a Blog and a list of interesting projects. They also set up Twitter and Facebook but with limited benefits according to the report.

There is some action on that front here in Iceland too as theMinistry of Industry recently set up a facebook page and is actually maintaining it.