"How many pages on my website"

We’ve been asked by clients to estimate the number of pages on their websites. No easy feat sometimes.

A quick and dirty solution is to use a search engine - you can search for “site:www.domain.eu” and it will show you how many pages are indexed with that search engine. Do this with Google, Yahoo and Bing and you’ll get a rough estimate.

Of course, these are only the pages which have been indexed by a search engine - which might remind you to submit your site to be indexed! Here are links for you to be able to submit your site to the following search engines:

Online PDF Viewer Tools

We’ve been looking into online PDF viewers for a client for a while now, trying to find something suitable. I was excited to read TechCrunch’s review of Issuu “Finally a web-based PDF Viewer That Does Not Suck”. But, it might look good, it might be faster than the others but for what we need, it does suck.

What did we need? We needed to be able to control where the publication was published, namely only the client’s website. It needed to be easy to use. It had to not need Flash. And, lastly, if it was storing the document we had to look into their data protection/privacy policy (see our note on the Safe Harbour Agreement). And, of course we had to consider the ‘look’ of the embedded PDF.

There was only one viewer which did everything we needed - Google Viewer. But, the end result doesn’t look brilliant and doesn’t have the magazine feel of Issuu.

The only other option which came close was Scribd. - you can make up to 50 000 documents private and it looks a lot better than Google and you can choose between scrolling and a slideshow view. The problem was Point 7 of their privacy policy

FOR USERS VISITING THE SCRIBD PLATFORM FROM THE EUROPEAN ECONOMIC AREA OR OTHER NON-U.S. TERRITORIES, PLEASE NOTE THAT ANY DATA YOU ENTER INTO THE SCRIBD PLATFORM WILL BE TRANSFERRED OUTSIDE THE EUROPEAN ECONOMIC AREA OR SUCH OTHER NON-U.S. TERRITORY FOR USE BY SCRIBD AND ITS AFFILIATES FOR ANY OF THE PURPOSES DESCRIBED HEREIN.IN ADDITION, BECAUSE SCRIBD OPERATES GLOBALLY, WE MAY MAKE INFORMATION WE GATHER AVAILABLE TO WORLDWIDE BUSINESS UNITS AND AFFILIATES. BY PROVIDING ANY DATA ON THE SCRIBD PLATFORM, YOU HEREBY EXPRESSLY CONSENT TO SUCH TRANSFERS OF YOUR DATA TO THE UNITED STATES OR OTHER COUNTRIES.

Which means that if you take data privacy seriously, we lose out in Europe. Again. Anyone have any suggestions? (sh)

*update! issuu has introduced ‘Paper Mode’ which doesn’t need Flash - we’ll be looking at this over the coming weeks

Safe Harbour Agreement 101

We get asked by clients a lot about the Safe Harbour Agreement. As we work with so many EU programmes/public entities/companies based in Europe we also find ourselves needing to make sure third party products and services we recommend are either based in the EU or have signed the agreement. And we get questioned about it. A lot.

We’ll be blogging on the quests for some of these tools over the coming weeks but first we thought it would be good to go back to basics - what is the Safe Harbor Agreement, why does it matter and why should you care?

The basics - What are European Personal Data Privacy rules?

In the mid 1990s, the EU wanted to ensure that there was a harmonisation of laws in all Member States towards personal data protection. After negotiations on a new directive and its entry into force in 1995, all Member States of the European Union had to ensure that Directive 95/46/EC was transposed into their own legal framework by the end of October 1998. This directive was then amended in 2003 by Regulation (EC) 1882/2003.

Both of these cover both private and public organisations/companies which operate within an EU Member State; as well as that it covers all data processed by automated means (e.g. a computer database of customers) and data contained in or intended to be part of non automated filing systems (traditional paper files). Essentially, it says what information may be stored legally, for what purpose and how it may be stored. It also covers the data subject’s rights to asking to see the data, data accuracy, deletion etc. And that subject’s right to judicial remedy.

The EU’s ‘Adequacy’ Test

If you are a public or private organisation/body/entity within the EU and you collect personal data you are not allowed to transfer data outside of the EU unless that nation has been deemed by the EU to have ‘Adequate’ data protection law. To simplify a longer dispute into a sentence: the United States was not deemed to have adequate laws. (Besides the Safe Harbour Agreement, it’s an interesting law to follow to see the differences in the concept, idea and legal right to privacy between Europe and the USA.)

Granting Safe Harbour

In 2000, after a series of negotiations the Safe Harbour Agreement, the US-EU reached an agreement that individual American companies could meet the ‘adequacy’ test by signing up to the ‘Safe Harbour Privacy Agreement’. Information on the agreement states:

In response to the European Commission Directive on Data Protection that could interrupt transfers of personal information from Europe to countries whose privacy practices are not deemed “adequate,” the U.S. Department of Commerce and the European Commission have developed a “safe harbor” framework that will allow U.S. organizations to satisfy the European Directive’s requirements and ensure that personal data flows to the United States are not interrupted. On July 27, 2000, the European Commission issued its decision in accordance with Article 25.6 of the Directive that the Safe Harbor Privacy Principles provide adequate protection.  The safe harbor framework bridges the differences between the EU and U.S. approaches to privacy protection and ensures adequate protection for EU citizen’s personal information.

To understand the impact of this you need to look at the word ‘transfer’. For us, day to day, our work is made more difficult as this can mean ‘storing on a server’. For example, your contact database is stored on an Amazon Server in US East (Northern Virginia)*. You are transferring data outside of the EU (note! both Amazon and Google have signed!). If you want to use an external tool which in any way means you are accessing/processing/storing personal data you need to make sure that either (a) that data is stored in Europe (b) it is stored in a nation which has met the EU’s adequacy test and (c) if it is based in the United States (as many of the cool tools we love are!) the company has signed up to the Safe Harbour Agreement.

As a company we can seem overly enthusiastic about European companies (our recent reaction to Brightbox, as an example). Yes, we like to support European businesses but it also makes it easier for us to know that we are recommending goods and services/we ourselves are using goods and services which meet the level of personal data protection which we are legally obliged to follow. There is little that is more frustrating than finding something great and then realising that we can’t use it because of the lack of Safe Harbour Agreement. We just wish more US companies would sign up! (sh)

* Not only does Amazon sell everything you could think of (and now food in Austria too - thank you Amazon!)  but it also rents servers…

Google Analytics for Google Spreadsheets

I have been looking to store certain data from Google Analytics in a document to show to a client. The catch being, I wanted this to be available on an ongoing basis, wanted real-time data but didn’t want to have information on there which was not of interest to them.

Happily, I found an easy way to do it thanks to Jamie Steven (@jamies). Who not only has published a tutorial on how to get real-time Google Analytics data into a Google spreadsheet to create a custom report - but he has also created a template which you can copy. Both extremely useful. (sh)

Useful Twitter Links

We work with some clients who are already establised on Twitter, know their RTs from their DMs and are starting to build a great community.

I was looking at expanding one client’s community with them and we decided to devote some time to finding new people to follow, look at when our tweets had the maximum impact and what shape the community we already had was in.

We spent a lot of time Twitter stalking (going through who was similar to us and who they followed etc…) and found the following links useful. I hope you find them useful too.

Finding People/Journalists/ and user directories

Useful admin

  • http://timely.is – Analyses your last 199 tweets and works out when is the best time for you to tweet so it gets maximum impact - it can then automate your tweets. Gives you some analysis too.
  • http://twopcharts.com – Not a very attractive site but it’s great for statistics etc. It also gives advice on when to tweet, who to follow etc
  • http://www.crowdbooster.com – A social media analysis with a nicer interface and graphs
  • http://www.tweetscan.com – This lets you to download your Tweets and goes back to 2007 (if you go back that far).

Random but cool

(And yes, we should use these links ourselves but, as ever, we spend more time on Twitter for clients than for us!) (sh)