Archive for November, 2007

Ashland Park, Lexington KY - Autumn 2007

Looks like Google Transit has rolled out Quebec’s AMT Service

I went to visit Agence métropolitaine de transport using Google’s link http://www.amt.qb.ca, but it had been hijacked! No wait. Google put ‘qb’ instead of ‘qc.’ Need to fix that folks. Should be qc…

Postscript: Google fixed the link.

AMT’s territory spans 63 municipalities and one native reserve, 13 regional county municipalities, and 21 transit authorities. It serves a population of approximately 3.7 million people who make more than 750,000 trips daily.

I thought I’d look at buying some shelves.  But when I looked at how many pages this site had, I was suddenly feeling pretty exhausted.    By page 16, I think I’ll need a nap. Oh, in case you’re wondering, searching didn’t help, you had to know the SKU.

Advice:

• You should improve your server performance so it can handle more products on a page, and have fewer pages.
• You should insert an intermediate grouping by “type” or “color” or “price point”… no, I don’t mean a search box.
• You should be more aware of the customer.   We are not going to spend 30m on your site.

The colors outside my office window are amazing today, even in subdued light. We never got this in Santa Clara!

We are all busy, but most of us love blogs. Finding, filtering, and selecting blogs is something that must be done by hand. because it requires that we personally evaluate an author’s efforts and give them enough time to show their stuff. It’s my blog audition, borne from necessity.

At one point I had 1400 blogs in Google Reader, haphazardly picked. Even with nicely developed folders, filters, and so on, I found myself wasting far too much time. So one day I got fed up. I did the equivalent of “touch bloglist.opml” and started over.

And, what evolved afterward was a very simple and effective method for narrowing down the thousands of blogs without impacting your daily flow.

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Google Transit expands once again as it announced inclusion of European locations from Italy to Switzerland, helping mass transit users efficiently move about! This is the latest in a series of changes recently including addition of Southeastern Virginia, Sacramento, and Vancouver BC.

Firenze (Florence) Italy and Torino (Turin) Italy (Gruppo Torinese Trasporti) - 90 million passengers every year.

Switzerland National (SBB, VBZ) - around 25,000km of mass transit.

Southeast UK including London (Traveline South East) - see this outstanding article about integration of UK’s public transit data into Google.

See also the post about this in Search Engine Land.