Construction Informer

The results of the annual Web Marketing Association’s WebAward have been announced and the Best Construction Website goes to : Johns Manville for its SpecJM.com Professionals Web Site.

The three construction sites that received the Outstanding Website award were: Elevation’s 1237WestWeb site, John Holland Group’s Partner of Choice Employer of Choice site and neboweb’s Leica Scanstation 2.

Honestly, I’m having a hard time figuring out why 1237WestWeb site, which is basically a student housing building in Chicago, was included on the construction list. And although Leica makes measurement instruments that are well-known in construction the website that received the award was for Leica’s crime scene mapper. Not very close to being construction-related, although verrrry interesting.

The Associated General Contractors earned an Associations Standard of Excellence Award.

There were 16 Construction Standard of Excellence Awards,

one Home Building Standard of Excellence (Builder Online) and one Home Building Standard of Excellence, Magazine Standard of Excellence Award (EcoHome Online).

I try to spend some time every week stopping by blogs of all types, and admittedly a lot of them are construction related. It’s pretty amazing to see how construction blogs are evolving and to witness the variety of information being presented, and the variety of approaches to presenting it.

As more and more multimedia becomes easier to work with on the web because of advances in how bandwidth and files are handled there is going to be a lot more audio and video available. The nuance to handling these mediums on the web though is going to require some pretty critical thinking.

I once made the comment in a post that many blogs were evolving into YouTube players with a couple of lines of text. Just because the bandwidth will support it doesn’t necessarily mean it is the best way to communicate a particular message. One recent example of choosing video, IMHO, at the right time to deliver the right message is Ron Roberts’, “How A Contractor Should NOT Run His Business.”

The content is fresh, and will be fresh for a long time. These are not mistakes that are going to suddenly change. There is some written explanation with it where people can get an idea of the kinds of things Ron went through to put it all together - it adds a human interest element that gives the experience additional depth. The content is valuable and lends itself to video. The program is short, just a little bit over three minutes. The program is done professionally with excellent sound.

Many people don’t pay enough attention to sound quality when it comes to video. They think the images will carry the show. One of the foremost experts on videography, Herbert Zettl, suggests in his book “Video Basics 3″ that if you turn off the sound on most any video you will have a much harder time following the story, than if you turn off the video and leave the sound in tact. Poor sound is also an indicator of an amateur production, as Zettl says:

You will find that most amateur video is characterized not just by the madly moving camera and fast zooms but by bad audio as well.

There’s no telling where this brave new world of communications options is going to take us. The best we can hope for though is that we are wise enough to choose the most effective tools for telling our stories, and not fall prey to using hammers to drive screws.

In the world of construction where people end up being scattered all over the place throughout the day it’s often a nightmare to get some face time, or to get everyone together for a meeting. By pulling people to a central place to attend a meeting not only is their time tied up for the meeting itself, but often there is some kind of a commute involved. Besides time, that also uses fuel.

There are a growing number of online meeting options springing up where you can call a meeting via email and at the designated time everyone logs into the meeting. During the meeting the presenters can be alternated and also anyone can put documents on the screen. Citrix’s GoToMeeting is one example where you pay a monthly flat fee starting at $49 and you can have up to 1000 meetings with up to 12 people each. The person calling the meeting sends a link with the meeting notice. The attendees click the link at the appropriate time and everyone gets connected. The screen shot below gives an example of the work space.

Over at Microsoft there is Live Meeting with voice and video ability as well as the usual characteristics like on screen collaboration and file sharing and editing. Microsoft lists the advantages as reducing travel, increasing productivity, reducing costs and accomplishing training - and all of this in a very immersive way.

What’s really interesting about this option is that when there are several participants in one room they all show up in video in a panoramic view, just as if you were looking at them in a conference room. This takes a piece of hardware that sits in the middle of the conference table and plugs into a presenter’s computer. Meanwhile, those remote participants show up on each person’s computer in a side pane. On the common screen people can share documents, web pages, screen shots and can work on a white board as well as take polls. Live Meeting costs from $4.58 to $15.42 per month/per user just depending upon how many you want in the meetings and whether or not you want the recorded meetings stored for a year. There are other options as well for volume purchasers.

Other options include Webex, Packetel and OfficeScape to name just a few.

I’ve always been surprised at the amount of blog spam there is. From my very first months in blogging my site was inundated with trackbacks and comments for every imaginable drug and xxx sites with all kinds of opportunities to view sexual situations that remind us how creative human beings are. But as I dutifully deleted them I wondered just how interesting or profitable this was to those who left the trackbacks, pingbacks and comments.

Over at the Akismet blog on November 27, 2007 Mark wrote a post about the nuances of spammers activities when it comes to blogs. He points out how pingbacks actually work like little content thieves and how spammers appeal to bloggers’ vanity by simply dropping complimentary comments containing links without actually commenting on the content of the posts specifically. Bloggers fall prey to this, thinking, “Oh, wow, somebody took the time to say they liked it!” without considering what they really said, or even if the commenter actually read the post.

Of course much of this is made easier and quicker by programs like KommentKing and CommentHut. These little jewels rove the web leaving nice comments on blogs. The submitted name KommentKing leaves is the anchor text and the website URL it leaves becomes the link. The developer claims to have run it all night and in the morning it had submitted comments to 2,000 blogs. Interestingly in a post about the program the coder mentions that some people actually thanked him for the backlinks. Then he dropped a caveat that the program doesn’t work well for “crappy spam” blogs since those bloggers “will know immediately that you are just a spammer and will not approve your comment.” So, we have an admission that this is actually spamming. (By the way I am intentionally NOT linking to the sources here since I don’t want to provide backlinks to them. If interested just search on the names and you will find them.)

This is one of the problems with the current model of SEO. The emphasis on backlinks as a determining factor as to a web site’s importance is encouraging volume linking to any content which in turn runs counter to the idea of developing valuable content. If the focus is on getting backlinks, regardless of their quality or regardless if they even have related content, then we’re right back to a web of spam.

For the time being I use Akismet which seems to capture 99 percent of the stuff that isn’t adding any value. This is a filtering program that runs the IP addresses, and posted URLs past its own huge list of spammers and if a match shows up the items are dumped into a spam cue. You can later investigate them, delete, or mark them as NOT spam. So far it hasn’t identified any desired comments as spam. The other thing I do is make all comments require approval.

How about you? Any good tactics for dealing with blog spam you’d like to share?

There is a continuing drive to make more and more things very visible on construction sites. From remote web cams to surveillance trailers equipped with everything necessary to make a site a 24-hour live TV show the sky is the limit when it comes to just how much you want to know about what goes on when you aren’t there.

A lot of people just plain don’t like the idea of being watched at work. It’s no wonder when you drive by site after site and see five people talking and drinking coffee while one person works. But it isn’t just human productivity at issue.

People steal stuff. I’m not talking about the occasional pen or clipboard or even lumber scraps. I’m talking about large quantities of things like steel, lumber, nails and even tools. It would be interesting to see if those who do the stealing would mind if someone took some of their stuff, but that’s a whole other trip into the study of human behavior. Suffice it to say if you own something there is probably someone who wants it…for free.

But there are some other compelling reasons why managers are electronically spying on their sites. A video record can help tremendously in disputes with clients, sub-contractors and even inspectors.

When getting into this activity you need to make sure you first of all know just why it is you want to have surveillance. Then, unless the budget is not an issue, you need to identify the highest priority locations on a site you want to have observed. Do you have someone in-house who can handle a do-it-yourself setup, or do you need to outsource? How are you going to respond to the things you find out?

What if you discover a very trusted employee has not deserved the trust you have extended? If that employee is a key player how will you handle your new found knowledge and still be fair to everyone else? What level of theft are you willing to put up with? Will you fire someone for taking three, two-foot long lumber scraps, or will you give them a warning? How will you deal with people shown taking excessive breaks, or working at half-speed? How will you respond when you catch people on tape doing excellent work and watching out for company property? You would be best served if you really thought out all the scenarios you might encounter and come to an understanding of where your limits are and when you feel action is necessary.

To get an idea of the kinds of equipment and costs you will be looking at you might consider checking out Spy Cam or WebCamProShop if you are inclined toward the DIY route. For solutions you can rent, lease or buy there are examples at SiteSeer. OxBlue is now offering a line of professional grade solar-ready construction webcams with rugged solar power stations to run them.