It looks like the Imperium has arrived at the planet earth, or at least San Francisco, checkout this video footage …

The footage is very clever.

This month carries good news on fuel prices – they’re dropping!  Although the drop is being pushed by a price war between the supermarkets more than the drop in the barrel price.  This does make the price drops a lot more variable and this is reflected in the latest figures having the highest regional variation since I’ve started doing the measurements.  It is also worth pointing out, that the drop so far has only taken fuel prices back by a couple months rather than to last year’s price plus annual inflation.

Source figures courtesy of the AA.

With more haulier protests in London yesterday over fuel prices and the rate of price inflation.  Here is a new monthly graph of fuel prices based on the AA figures:

The critical values are that diesel has gone up 9.1% from last month and unleaded has increased by 6.3% since last month.  Diesel is now averaging 13p per litre more expensive than unleaded.

I’ve never entirely be convinced by the suggestion that using social networking technologies to form a business intranet.  That is, until today when I heard a podcast presented by the Chief Technologist of Ektron as part of the SWSX conference. To date I’ve viewed the intranet as needing to be able provide static content (e.g. standard documents such as benefits etc) and a dynamic area for knowledge sharing.

What Bill Cava highlighted is that a large percentage (50%) of people found site searching for information can be ineffective. But by exploiting people’s innate understanding of human relationships and roles.  So by leveraging that, you improve the chance of finding what you need.  For example configuration information for a VPN, well talk to a system admin as they’ll know where the documentation is, and may well even have links from their profile to the information. This really plays dividends on distributed or larger organisations.

Secondly, social networking sites also have forum style areas where a written exchanges can be posted. But unlike the forum, the participation in the discussion can be more easily configured and dynamically controlled (self organising). But there is also context to the conversation as the social network provides detail about the participants.

Lastly the intranet only delivers value if its used, and to get use it must provide the engage-ability that social networking functionality can offer.  As Bill points out we perform web analytics on company business sites, and should we not also do that for the intranet to understand that its value and contribution to the business operation.

I’d recommend listening to the podcast if you’re looking how to improve your business’ internal IT resources, although it is slow slow going to get the nuggets from the ‘cast.

Protests over fuel prices are starting to kick in again, with a number of convoys around the country on a go slow impacting traffic.  More details at BBC NEWS.  According to the BBC …

Treasury spokesman said the government understood business and families were “feeling the pressure from high fuel prices”.

But they said the “immediate priority” was to encourage oil-producing countries to increase output, that a 2p-per-litre fuel duty increase had been put back from April to October and fuel duty was “still 11% below its 1999 level, in real terms”.

The fact that the prices are 11% less in real terms, is misses the most crucial the point, which is the rate of change that is the problem, and that if fuel prices are to rapidly correct based on that real terms figures is going to really hit inflation.