In this exclusive article we will be looking at globallylocal.com and what we can expect to see once the code starts to roll into production and the doors are opened to the public later this year.

While some surprises no doubt remain I think it is safe to say that some things can be predicted with savage certainty.


Adullam Limited started globallylocal.com (GL) the day the company formed. It was written in classic ASP and based on a HND project of Adullam Limited's Founder Matt Brown.

Shortly thereafter it added an open source project called MaxWebPortal which was reworked into MaxWebEdit.

The plan had always been to create a user-centric portal of information relating to take-aways, business and local amenities reviewed and categorized by the customers that use them. It seemed clear that the selfsame feedback systems used to build customer confidence on auction sites combined with the power of user opinion meant that a single system could answer such questions as "Which of these sixteen is the best plumber?", "Where can I get a good pizza" or even "I'm a woman and want to get my car repaired but not my body ogled - where is best?"

If you could find out the average price of a pint in pub, if they have football or cricket and what state the pool table is when trying to find a good local after moving to a new town. That would be something useful.

But for the shop in some little town somewhere that makes custom saddles for motor bikes. That shop might be the only one like it. But the profit margin is such that they may not feel it wise to try and set up and run a web shop on top of everything else. But if they were able to be found via a really good index maybe they could trade with people living the other end of the country.

Suddenly little shops would have the edge over bigger chains and who knows where it could end.

That is still the dream to this day.

However, It soon became clear that ogled did not handle objects in the way that GL needed and a new open-source project was started to stimulate innovation. However more problems were to emerge. First ASP was ending it's time in the sun and being replaced by ASP.NET and second the database of choice was starting to return messages such as "QUERY TOO COMPLEX".

What was being attempted was not going to happen on that platform. This meant that whatever the next step learning of a new platform and language was pretty certain.

After much soul searching a new platform was selected it would be selected purely for the power of it's data system.

The winner in the cost verses benefit trade off was something called MySQL and it one by a very wide margin. Not only was it free but it was widely supported and well documented.

MySQL had a number of features that would prove invaluable to the design process - the ability to use regular expressions (complex pattern matching) rather than simple like statements. What was immediately obvious was that this would allow more relevant results from search.

MySQL works with a large number of platforms and whatever shouted loudest would be the winner.

One that stood out was Linux, Apache and PHP in a set up so common as to be known as LAMP. The M being the MySQL element that would allow the complex data interrogation.

A new project orbit42 was started from scratch to allow building blocks to be rapidly assembled from a base class that would play nicely with any other well written system.

Orbit42 is almost ready to start test runs of the code with the public and gloallylocal.com is preparing to create the biggest global listing of useful information that has ever been created.

So what can we expect?

To start with expect to see the simple stuff - user accounts, user profiles and a few map related technologies but expect that to come with the ability to list and tag your favorite take away, taxi firm or pub.

Also expect to be able to search an aggregated subset of that public knowledge.

Expect the different "whats" (pub, hotel, shop, park...) to have different questions associated with it.

But most of all expect the site to become very popular.

More than that, I can not say. But it will be very good, very rich in information and free to access, being largely uncluttered by things like adverts or needless images.