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.

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.

Framsókn

174 members, 2 discussion topics and 11 wall posts

Frjálslyndi flokkurinn

I could not find an official group but the youngsters have 12 fans and a couple of photos from last October

Vinstri Grænir

128 members and 7 wall posts

Samfylkingin

Again, no official group but the local branch in Akureyri launched a group yesterday and have 21 members, 2 discussion topics and 15 photos.

Sjálfstæðisflokkurinn

217 members, 2 wall posts, 1 photo and 2 videos.

To contrast this, Appelsínugulir (orange) a group of peaceful protesters created a group last week and at the point of writing this, have 16915 members, 7 discussion threas, 165 wall posts, 24 photos and 11 posted items.