Me and my iPod - and a lesson for ABB?

I had a hard disc crash on my PC some months ago. It turned out that the back-up hadn't run since last summer, due to some glitch in the network setup. The help desk apologized and took the blame and helped me scrape whatever content could still be saved from the wrecked hard disc. Luckily they managed to rescue most of my files, including my music files.

I was happy, but my iPod was not. It refused to sync with my PC, and wouldn't even let me restore, which iPod owners will know is a last resort. I kept struggling with it for several hours, but in the end I had to give up. This weekend I finally had some time on my hands, and I decided to fix it no matter what it would take. It turned out to be much less than I anticipated...

As I connected the iPod and tried again to restore, an error message was the only result. "Unknown error -1418". Not much help, really. Or? I went to apple.com, clicked on support and entered "iPod error -1418" into the search. And presto; the first hit was a page that explained in detail how to create a batch file that would fix the issue. Five minutes later I was the happy owner of a fully functional iPod again.

And the lesson for ABB? As I keep stressing, it is next to impossible to manage expectations on the web. Users spend most of their time on other web sites and this determines their expecations. As more and more users have these kind of experiences on other web sites, they will come to expect a similar service level on ours. And how long will it be before they get it? Some have come quite a way, but I suspect too many have not even started thinking about how they can do it.

How many are taking part in the Web 2.0?

A survey by PEW has fired up a heated discussion about how many actually take active part in the "new" web, meaning not only passively reading, but actively contributing. According to the survey 49% of the US population has little or no interest in Web 2.0. The survey finds that 31% are "Elite users", with another 20% being "Middle of the road tech users".

Some commentators says the numbers are disappointingly low, but personally I tend to agree with Jakob Nielsen who find the numbers exaggerated: "It’s overstating this survey to say that “almost 40 per cent of people blog, upload photos, post comments and so on.” What the survey found was that 37% said that they had (at least) once done one of these things."

The 1/9/90 rule of thumb has been floating around the web for quite a while, saying 90% read, 9% comment and rate, while only 1% actively participate. Quite a few doubt its validity.Forrester has a different perspetive on this, you can read a summary of their views here. They argue that the participation rate depends on the type of site; Active participation is higher on sites like MySpace than on sites like YouTube, rather obvious in my opinion.

So what is the situation in ABB? It would be interesting to know, if we could find out. My guess would be that we have an abnormal distribution with many at either end of the scale; Many tech savvy users in one end and in the other end far too many who still insist their assistant prints out their e-mail so they can read them...

Google - your best friend?

Google drawfs all other search engines in driving traffic to abb.com and our country sites. In April this year Google generated more than a third of all visits, far more than any other search engine. Number two was baidu.com, their Chinese competitor with 2.3%, while Yahoo had 1.8% and MSN only 0,4%. In total there were more than 500 different domains driving traffic to our sites, but none of the others had more than a fraction of a per cent.