We went walking yesterday on the south downs, near to where we live and found a balloon.

It had travelled from Birmingham, all the way unaided to land in a National Nature Reserve called ‘Castle Hill‘. (If I was a balloon, that’s the sort of place I would want to land in).

A school girl called Raju, had sent this up into the sky in the Midlands not knowing of whether she would hear from her balloon again,

It was this interaction if she had not done it, that would not have affected us either way, but because we did it lifted our spirits on a cold winters day and got us thinking about the smile on her face when she learns about the adventures of her balloon.

It has travelled approximately 180 miles. Some made it across the channel to France, how ever her’s decided to land on the footpath we were walking down a day or two later.

We wrote to the school to tell them that we had found the balloon, along with the two photos below of Fiona and the landing site.

Interaction with users in real life, much like social networks where people who wouldn’t normally connect have the chance to share experiences and captivate their lives as well as others around them.

This is the good side of social networking.

Map showing distance ballon travelled

Fiona holding the balloon tag

Landing site – Castle Hill nature reserve

Google has a reputation for never completing a project. GMail has been around for five years but is yet to lose its “beta” tag. Docs, Calendar and many other Google services are still beta-products despite having evolved radically since their initial release.

The company’s reasoning for endless beta cycles has never been clearly explained, and Google always insisted the tag would be removed once the product was ready. I suspect Google’s motivation for beta tagging is a combination of:

• It reminded users that the web application was experimental and undergoing development.
• It lowered user expectations of early web systems and gave us a pleasant surprise to find fully-functional online products.
• Version numbers rarely have much meaning when applied to web applications and services. Unlike shrink-wrapped disk-distributed software, web solutions can be incrementally improved on a daily basis. Few people, other than the developers, will care if it’s version 7 or 57.

However, Google has finally recognised that the “beta” label has different connotations in the business world and it could be damaging their prospects. Many business users are put off because they associate the term with incomplete or untested software.

It is possible that other Google products will follow the example set by Chrome. The web browser had a beta period of just 100 days and is already at version 2, even though it was only released in September 2008. Could Google’s beta habit be over?

Has Google’s use of beta labels ever confused, or put off any of your clients?

The fastest growing language in Europe in Nerdic, a collection of buzz words and phrases used by computer geeks to describe new gizmos, say researchers. A hundred new words per year are added to Nerdic, which contains all three core elements that define a language – words, phrases and pronounciations.

Two of the latest are Wimax, a supersized wi-fi that gives entire cities internet coverage, and UGC, which refers to User Generated Content online such as Facebook.

Further reading: Geek speak rule at Wired.com

After a recent trip to India I felt I had to blog about the work and detail that goes into making street and shop signs.

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