South Pacific Web Mapping

Late last year Google announced that the next major update to the Page Rank Algorithm (search result indexing) will start taking into account the pages load (response time) see below:

This is introduce a major challenge while developing and hosting NZ/AU based web application, which many believe could be addressed using the following delivery techniques:

1) Identify your main landing pages for your primary key terms and define the most frequently managed content (banners, specials, news etc.) and push the container HTML out to the cloud managing the content using iframes or content deployment technologies (such as SharePoint).

2) Using more frequently updated pages with heavier functionality as link juice back into those primary fast loading landings pages.

3) Its been confirmed that both Bing and Google will not penalize on repeating content within sub domains (e.g. nz.mysite.com and au.mysite.com) allowing regional content and location related functionality to exist closer to its potential audience while containing similar data and templates.

4) Following the Latency Recommendations for AU/NZ based web pages for minimising the response time only to the one introduced as a result of router hops and distance.

2010 will be a good year for optimising South Pacific content, ensuring high ranking on future mobile device based search results(these will have only five relevant winners on the first page ;o)

Some of my sites are hosted in Kansas City,MO which is a common location for many large data centers in the US,  Kansas is a popular place for building data centers because it provides equal network latency for both east and west cost clients due to its central location (latency depends on the length of the actual link, i.e. how long is the transmitting optical fiber cable).

Kansas City was initially built because of the strategic confluence of the Kansas and Missouri rivers that provided good steam ship transport through the Mississippi-Missouri river.

Kansas City 1869

Being a large population center on the river it had one of the first major railroad bridges across the Missouri  which made the city a major south to north east to west railroads hub

Once the optical fiber network infrastructure used by the core of today’s Internet was build, the public land of the railroad grid has been utilised for laying out the cables making it the new communication highway, Kansas once again became a major network/data center hub (all of this because the same bridge on the same old river..)

(source: colocationmontreal.com).

I am currently running most of my response time and web latency tests from Dallas and Kansas which provides extremely reliable results giving the infrastructure and location of those data centers.

The Google GMail Team came up with this one for solving latency issues on mobile based apps:

http://ajaxian.com/archives/gmail-mobile-latency

This one speeds the loading of a mobile web page + full parsing of  the interaction layer(Javascript) from 2600ms to 240ms (10 faster!!) on the same script block size(200KB)!!

Worth trying when customising web apps for moblies (which has good 3G bandwidth but really bad  latency due to the transport over microwave).

I am currently within the last stage of defining my research thesis in computer science, this research will address methods for delivering GeoWeb applications while minimising the effect of network latency on user experience.

This proposal is a result of practical experience in designing and developing web applications for the New Zealand and Australian Internet market for the last 7 years, the research aims to provide scientific evidence and methodologies for minimising the effect of network latency on the load time of web content (see my post on this subject here).

With the latest advances in response/load-time monitoring and measurements services, it is now possible to collect statistics of monitoring agents across the globe and identify network trends towards optimising web delivery according to the originating content requirements.

A typical web based map mash-up could potentially include HTTP requests from several different sources (content providers, storage distributors etc.) spanning across several continents, selecting the optimal resources during the initial load of the page (the DOM Ready browser phase) will be the primary factor for efficiently serving web content.

Within my practical professional experience I have been maintaining and monitoring over 110 servers while optimising the actual web applications running on top of those servers for delivering rich graphic content. This optimisation included usage of CDN providers, requests source tracking and progressive download techniques while monitoring the results from numerous locations around the globe.

A notable network monitoring solution that I have been using within my research since 2006 is Pingdom, which I believe is the only response time monitoring solution that exposes an API. This feature enables querying its worldwide monitoring agents counters for generating real-time, applications specific, global response time reports and statistics.

In February 1882 the Dunedin sailed out of Port Chalmers loaded with New Zealand dairy products targeting London’s markets while overcoming the distance limitations and utilising the latest cooling technologies, becoming the first commercial refrigeration ship ever.

I believe that with the massive move towards SaaS technologies powered by the growing IT Outsourcing/Cloud Computing trend, New Zealand’s prime location and unique IP routing link could play a significant role in researching ways for overcoming network limitations for physically distributed services.

On the arrival of the Dunedin in London 98 days laterThe Times commented: “Today we have to record such a triumph over physical difficulties, as would have been incredible, even unimaginable, a very few days ago…” which sounds very relevant considering the development of the internet today.