Archive for the ‘Web Tools’ Category

AjaxWorld Keynote with Jesse James Garrett

Categories: Conference, Events, Web Theory, Web ToolsPosted on October 3rd, 2006

Conversations with Jeremy Gellan
Had a brief converastion with Jeremy Gellan the conference organizer. Thank you Jeremy and Ajax World organizers for the press pass. As the caretaker of this growing ecosystem, he’s held conferences in New York, Europe, and will expand as the industry does.

Keynote Speech: Jesse James Garrett

Thought Leadership
Reflects on his initial Elements of User Experience diagram which evolved into the book of the same name. Also the founder of the Visual Vocabulary. Currently at Adaptive Path, where the “figure out what people want, and then build designs for them”. Flickr, technorati, creative comments, Six Apart, Microsoft, United Nations and of course, Hitachi Data Systems. Even the term “blog” came out of Adaptive Path.

The Story of Ajax
A client had to build web-based applications for an insurance company. Jesse did UX research on Insurance agents. Applications must be responsive and fast for these insurance agents. Responsiveness for the web was needed. At first flash was thought to be the initial technology. Needed to present this technology to president of the company however needed a single word to present to client. Jesse published the essay on his website, went on vacation for two weeks. Upon his return, his inbox was flooded with inquires.

Two Concepts of Ajax:

1) Asynchronous interaction model.
This fundamentally breaks the nature of the web. The web is designed for document retrieval (synchronous). Decoupling the user experience from the server/client interaction. “Roller skates for the web” vs constantly taking steps.

Interaction Design, Desktop Responsiveness, Web Simplicity. Web is one of the most rapidly adopted technologies in human history (Not sure what first is).

2) Browser-native Technologies
Now these experiences can be delivered with no compromises. (such as an application for a specific browser with SSP). Another appeal is incremental migration, you don’t need migrate all of your application into a new platform (like Flash). Ajax can be deployed in bits. Another benefit is using ‘view source’, the work is out in the open.

Why now?
These technologies have been around for a while, why has this been embraced in 2005? The end of the browser war. Secondly, the rise of scripting languages. Perl, Python, Pine, Ruby. Google’s applications broke ground as they improved problems that had already been solved (email and maps). Gmail was the first high-profile product that came out. Yahoo management got nervous, as Yahoo mail is a significant source of revenue. Yahoo took an inventory of all their products, and took assessment of what products could be vulnerable a Google. Yahoo maps was not identified as a weakspot, Yahoo did not see Google Maps coming.

Who Benefits?
Early adopters, those who get in and experiment.

What Next?
How will browsers evolve to respond to Ajax? It’s no longer as a document retrieval application, but now to consider that the web is an application environment.

Cross Training
Developers and Designers must work together, observations that if they do not learn from each other they won’t be able to build a successful application. Designers are cross training in Development, and vice versa. Data is the core, logic is secondary, and then User Experience. This is not how users of websites think of sites, they see the user experience and rest is ‘magic’. The experience is the product. (Jeremiah: but isn’t content the product?)

User Focused Development and Design
UI should not be the end task at the experience. User lead design and development should come first. “Designing from the outside in!” –Tim O’Reilly.

Resources
Infoworld has a nice writeup

Kurt has a very comprehensive write-up on several sessions

Robby is taking notes as well.

Jeremy Gellen, AjaxWorld Producer

How normal users think your site works

Jesse Speaks

Jesse on Stage

Folks hanging out in the vendor gallery

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Why Alexa is not Worthless

Categories: Web Tools, Web UsagePosted on September 29th, 2006

John thinks that Alexa is worthless but it’s not. Like a survey it’s a sample of an audience, while it may not be completely accurate, there is no other tool out there that can provide measurement across all sites as we don’t have access server analytics on all websites.

My former manager explained that analytics in themselves are pretty useless, they vary from one system to another. The rule is to follow and look for trends, patterns, spikes and valleys and how they tie to events on the websites or around the industry.

John, while it may not be very accurate (and a bit easy to manipulate) it’s not worthless, as it’s the best we have.

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Understanding Amazon’s EC3 (Cloud Computing)

Categories: Data Storage, Web ToolsPosted on September 28th, 2006

I just learned from Julio about Amazon’s next major move called Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) – Limited Beta. You know about Amazon’s entery into Online Data Storage right? Smugmug pays them $27,000 a month as a storage utility, it’s a pay as you go model.

“Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

Just as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) enables storage in the cloud, Amazon EC2 enables “compute” in the cloud. Amazon EC2’s simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon’s proven computing environment. Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change. Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing you to pay only for capacity that you actually use.”

Making IT a Utlity (like Power, Gas, Cable)
They are building a complete outsourcing of your IT department for consumers, small business, and in some cases medium sized businesses. Perhaps soon they will provide helpdesk support (pay per minute), rent desktops and laptops (pay per minute) or even access to applications (like photoshop) via a web tunnel or some type of pay-per-minute usage fee.

Want to learn more about Online Data Storage? I’ve predicted these things happening here (I know I push this post, but it’s not because I want traffic, but it’s because there are some important changes happening)

More Resources

Alexis defines EC3 in more detail
He points to Pillbox which is running on EC2
Amazon’s Dev Blog

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Interview with MySpace User: Not just the teen demographic

Categories: Social Media, Web Marketing, Web Strategy, Web Tools, Web UsagePosted on September 27th, 2006

I want to dispel the myth that MySpace is for teens alone, in fact I’m hearing more and more from folks that it’s indeed crossing the middle segment of age and culture. According to SFSU Prof Dr John Sullivan:

“More than 80 percent of the site’s registered members fall into the core demographic of 16-to-34-year-olds. Note that this demographic includes a large quantity of college-educated professionals with as much as 13 years of work experience…” (outside the box recruiting)

Also, others are noting that MySpace is growing up:

MySpace, the cyber home of countless teens and 20-somethings, is attracting more interest from an older crowd. In fact, the News Corp. (NWS – commentary – Cramer’s Take) site has recently experienced declines in its audience aged 12 to 17, 12 to 24 and 12 to 34, while seeing increases in the 21-to-34, 25-to-34, and 35-to-54 demographics, according to data from comScore Networks. (MySpace grows up)

Interview with MySpace User: 52 year old parent and Martial Arts Instructor
To learn more, I’ve done an interview with a MySpace user (John, a parent and respected silicon valley profesional) that doesn’t fit the young teen audience, let’s hear from John:

1) How old are you? (you can say early 40s, or mid 40s if not your specifics)
Ha. My Myspace page gives my age – 52. Myspace pages show your age – you can lie – but you have to give a birthdate.

2) When did you first start using MySpace and why?
Around March of 2006. I teach cardio kickboxing at a gym called WAMA and was seeking SEO strategies to drive people to the WAMA website. I have a younger friend who started another fitness studio and she made a Myspace page, which was a huge hit with her friends and people who took her classes. I also noticed that the Myspace pages in general had high google rankings (long story). So I made a page for myself, with hotlinks to the WAMA web site.

3) What are your primary reasons for using MySpace, which features suit you best? How frequent do you use it?
My primary reason was attracting people to my cardio kickboxing classes. I like the free-form nature of Myspace page creation which lends itself to creative expression. The multimedia effect of having sound as a standard feature, and of being able to integrate whatever graphics you choose either as backgrounds or individual pictures. Of being able to use hotlinks to offsite locations. It was a lot of fun building the page. I usually log in once a week or so, or whenever Myspace sends me mail telling me someone is trying to contact me.

4) What type of people do you interact with, are they similar to you?
Unlike my friend Paige, I have had little luck getting my local peers to make Myspace pages. Martial artists over 30 are often not very interested in online networking. Most of my interactions are with people from around the world who have similar interests in the fitness space. I did work with the friend who owns WAMA to make a WAMA Myspace page that is pretty closely integrated into the WAMA website.

5) Do you have concerns for online behaviors in MySpace, and what would you recommend ?
No real concerns. If you pay attention to the Myspace guidelines (don’t use full names, don’t give personal contact details). I think the press makes a lot of noise about problems on Myspace because it sells… I found my son (17) had a Myspace page, I’d advise parents to ask their children about their web activities, just as they would ask them where they went at night.

6) If social sites like MySpace were not around, how would you communicate with your network?
Well, I primarily use Myspace for advertising. I am beginning to use Myspace for networking, but I still use Linkedin and direct email more. But I’m an old goat. I don’t even text message…

7) In your personal time, what else do you do online?
Research things I’m interested in. Read the news. Read blogs. Track new web applications (web 2.0esque – have you seen swarm?). Build websites and post things I’ve written. Keep in touch with old friends.

Thank you John for your time, you’re one of the individuals I’ve been so impressed with that adopts and harnesses technology very rapidly. If others have folks for John (or just want to be his MySpace friend) please leave a question below, and perhaps he’ll have the time to answer, once he’s done hanging out in MySpace.

Additional Resources:

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Podcasts put users in control, and is an “Ambient” medium

Categories: Podcasts, Web Tools, Web UsagePosted on September 24th, 2006

This post in response to Phil’s experience listening to the TalkCrunch podcast “Pocasts are Too Long“. While yes, an hour could be considered long, he’s in more control than he realizes. Phil, here’s some tips and suggestions that could empower as a podcast consumer:

1) Browser players give you control: You can control the podcast in the browser, the player that Mike’s embedded lets you fast forward, rewind, stop the podcast. Try dragging the arrow left and right. (TV, Talk radio, radio doesn’t give you this control)

2) MP3 gives you control: On your mobile MP3 Player you have the same amount of controls if not more.

3) Most of the time, more is better: Having more content in this medium may be better than not having enough, since with points 2 and 3, you’re in control (kind of like Tivo)

4) Podcasts put the listener in charge: you can simply turn it off.

5) Podcast are an Ambient Medium: which means you can do other things unlike reading, or watching video. You can drive, cook, eat, or put one earbud in your left ear when your wife is chewing you out about blogging too much while driving. (don’t forget to nod once in a while and mutter the occasional “yes dear”)

Oh, and I’m not getting into the whole Podcast naming debate so I’ll just use the term “Podcast” for now.

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Seth’s “Top things to do if you run a website” and responses from a Web Strategist

Categories: Web Analytics, Web Strategy, Web Theory, Web ToolsPosted on September 24th, 2006

Seth Godin one of the top minds in Marketing has released this post called top 8 things to do if you manage a website.

Good starting list but from someone involved with corporate websites (and know many others) not all of these are valid corporate web strategies.

I see this list as great for small websites trying to harness low cost marketing and social media, but for a large eCommerce site, more serious tools, considerations and strategy need to be considered, measured and analyzed.

My thoughts below:

1. Register with Technorati
Jeremiah: Register a corporate site for Technorati is an interesting idea, but does this model work if your homepage is not pushing RSS?

2. Become a Digger
Jeremiah: Become a Digger, yup, makes sense, soon we’ll have all of our employees digging and we’ll learn to game the system. So if one company that has 300,000 employees gets all their employees to digg every press release will that make Digg effective and accurate?

3. Build a Squidoo lens
Jeremiah: I’ve not used it (Mike Arrington didn’t speak highly of it at Future of Web Apps) Squidoo is a company that Seth is involved with.

4 Get your team to spread the word
Jeremiah: Agreed! Some of the best evangelists in your company are you loyal employees.

5. Issue a press release
Jeremiah: Perhaps when relevant, also consider using blogs?

6. Get a sister site for testing
Jeremiah: Most corporate web groups have staging sites, development sites, testing sites, production sites for testing, refining and iterative changes.

7. Google Analytics
Jeremiah: I have a buddy who’s a senior analytics guy at a eCommerce company in Silicon Valley, they have dozens of analysts who are measuring their website using analytics tools, and they’re NOT using Google Analytics.

8. Don’t be boring
Jeremiah: Agreed.

Seth, I think these are great points for the small business, however they may not apply to the larger or corporate web strategy. I’d love to hear the thoughts and opinions from others.

Oh, I met Seth in Vegas, he’s an amazing speaker.

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Online Video Services Taste Test

Categories: Social Media, Video, Web ToolsPosted on September 23rd, 2006

I’ve been testing a few of the online video services, not sure which one is best for my needs, or which ones will emerge the winner. I suspect when it comes to technology adoption getting the influencers to use it first is key. Think about Blogger, Wordpress, and Typepad. There’s tons of other blog software out there, but we don’t hear about them.

Blip
Here’s a video I just took this afternoon in Chicago of Millenium Park, it’s an interactive digital public art piece (although not picture the mouths spurt out water, and there’s waterfalls that flow over the LEDs). You can view the Fountains in a small version in Quicktime and webpage, or the higher-res Quicktime. I like how flash videos load fast, but often the quality is noticably lower in sound quality and color desaturation as I suspect the files are being optimized. I also recorded The “Bean”, Higher Res. and the view from the top of the John Hancock (Higher Res) building on the 95th floor.

Revver
I’ve started uploading some videos in Revver. The flash interface is pretty slick. did you know Revver splits revenue with the uploader? Update: I couldn’t publish my other videos above as we could be making revenue off other’s art work. I’ll take some orginal content today. I love the dashboard concept, makes it easy for me. (Update: here’s my revver video, I uploaded one before of the fountains above, and couldn’t be used as it’s a protected art work. Since Revver is generating revenue, uploaders must be selective in the process)
Google and YouTube
I’ve uploaded videos to Google Video and YouTube before, view my Online Video Archive.

Things I’m Looking For
I’ll make a decision to which video services I’ll be using. Some of the requirements are, high res video, blog friendly, rss/microformat, easy to upload, unlimited upload storage, fast streaming, no-cost, easy to use interface. Revenue Generation is nice, but not why I do it. (picky huh?).

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Future of Web Apps Conference Notes (Day 1)

Categories: Conference, Events, Web Strategy, Web Theory, Web Tools, Web UsagePosted on September 13th, 2006

Carson Systems hosts Future of Web Apps
Thanks to Lisa from Carson for the pass, will take as many notes for the web community as possible. They are a well staffed group, I could tell from when they were handing out the badges, good sign of things to come. The Carson ’survival kits’ (web developer how tos) were selling like hot cakes, great packaging, nicely done.

More: See Day 2 Conference Notes

Flickr Pics of the event are going up, they are tagged: Futureofewbapps-sf06
~~Internet connection is bad here, I’ll try to post when possible.~~ (Yeah, the Wireless is up as of 3pm) Interesting thoughts from Simeon.

If you’re interested, please read my post on the Future of Online Data Storage.

Community
There are quite a few international folks that came to this, love seeing the web community unite. Ran into Oskar a reader of my blog, he’s a Web Strategist in Madrid. If anyone is seeking a web product manager or web project manager, please let me know, I can connect you with him. Oskar, it was a pleasure meeting you, thanks for coming up and introducing yourself, I’m really really thankful to meet readers, esp from on the other side of the world.

Ran into Tara Hunt, finally met Chris Messina, Scott Beale, Brian Oberkirch, Kristy Wells, Joel from Cnet, Kevin Burton, Kris/Thomas from Zooomr, Dan Farber and very pleased that Chris Salazar has joined me. The Web 2.0 show guys are behind me and have a nice write up summary. The crowd is typical web developer, young male, geeky.

Emerging Age of Who –Dick Hardt
A topic on ‘who’, and the next generation of identity. Indidviduals have many different logins, login names, pictures, etc. This is a pain for every web user, how many logins do we have? Identity is clearly going to be an issue going forward. Not sure who will have the solution

Digg -Kevin Rose
Dan Farber has a great writeup. Dig was started with $2000 dollars. Social Media at work. The stories that are submitted are live for 4 hours. They just rolled out a new feature called “Number 1 story”, it’s kinda like a favorites. If a user sees that their friends have dugg a story, then they are more likely to digg it as well.

Rapid rollout: Met a developer at elance, open source technology (LAMP), basic utilitarian design, $99 a month hosting.

Kevin thinks there are three types of design: 1) cheap, make your developer do it 2) a few hundred to do it, but you’ll wish you spent more 3) A few thousand dollars.

200+ Blog readers, just for users with personal passion for tech, limited functionality, they highlight users on diggnation (that’s community marketing yo)

Feature Decisions: (this is key for web product managers)
Tools for self expression
Stay away from me too features
Simple and rewarding –one click (dig, bury, #17)
Destroy the garbage (bury stories, and even comments)
Experiment – stack, swarm, bigspy, activities of users.

Digg Stack shows who is submitting a story, dude, check this out, the UI features and tracking are fun to watch as well as seem easy to use.

Digg Swarm is a social network surrounder. Also see Biggspy

The Digg Effect: Why not cache it? They believe they should drive traffic back to the sites.

Half a million registered users, 10 million pages per day, 1million daily unique visitors
Developer Resources: Go download “Inside LiveJournal’s Backend” (PDF)

Future Plans, Learning from users interests, story suggestions, friend suggestions. Digging other types of content online. Tech, Politics and now video are happening.

Q&A highlights:
1) An API is coming.
2) Ads are provided by Federated Media, and Google Adsense. He’s trying to be limited in the amount of ads on his site.
3) Timeline: Started and Owen for first four months. Got angel invested for 50k to buy his own servers. They have 15 people, most are PHP developers and folks that can scale the site. (they will need a storage strategy)

Tom Coates –Yahoo
How to make a website where the sum is greater than it’s parts: Social Sites by Tom Coates from Yahoo

Community Motives:
-Anticipated reciprocity
-Reputation
-‘Sense of Efficacy’ (having an effect on the world)
-Identification with a group

Check out MUDs Hearts Clubs Diamonds, Spades Players who suit MUDs. How to reward community members.

Tantek Celik, CTO Technorati –Microformats

All his slides are on tanket.com

He uses HTML webpages for his presentation not PPT
Demonstrated how to the Hcard contact to Vcard converter. It converts it automatically. Microformats enable the publishing and sharing of higher fidelity information on the web. Some of the first uses of Microformats were modeled after license agreements, and using stylesheets. Gave example of Blog quote with Microformats.

Tantek suggests that all communities that are working on standards should be working on them in open.

Microformats principles, must solve a specific problem, simple as possible, humans first and machines second. Reuse from widely adopted standards, modularity and embeddability. Decentralized, development, content and services.

hCalendar to iCalendar converter is possible, seamless import into a calendar application.

10 Things you didn’t know about RSS. Feedburner –Steve Olechowski
Feeds are continuing to grow, outside of just the BBC site.

1) No correction between click through rate to HTML site and number of subscribers, very erratic and fluctuates

2) A consumer device can drive a market

3) More text = more total traffic
However there is no correlcation between traffic back to your site, you may have two audiences, between rss and html

4) Podcasts are more evenly distributed across categories than text feeds
15% or podcasts are video and growing. He won’t be surprised if videopodcasts overtake podcasts

5) Different feed and different types of content have different breakdowns about how they read feedreadres. Chinese and Japanese blogs are more than all North America blogs

6) There’s over 3000 RSS clients out there
Be careful before making assumptions

7) And a LOT of bots
I’m thinking about all the splogs out there too.

MyYahoo leads by a large margin (over 50%)

9) RSS is being read on mobile

10) Publishers are making money with RSS
This is trending upwards, please remember that RSS audience is different than the HTML audience. Treat them differently.

Questions and observations how users still use HTML to view content vs feedreadres, and how folks still use email to subscribe to feeds.

ZoneTag –Yahoo

5 Million photos are Flickr Geo Tagged, wow that was fast. The ‘tagmap’ shows what is being tagged on the conference. This is much like ‘tagclouds’ but for maps. Most cell phones know where they are, we have location metadata to use.

2-click upload, smooth experience. Photo uploaded with location and time metadata. You can add tags, which will pull from location context. Stuff around you it will pull: Yahoo Local, Upcoming.org. It can tell you stuff that’s happening around you, as it knows who you are, where you are, and what time it is.

Tagged: Futureofwebapps-sfo6 (sheesh that’s too long)

More: See Day 2 Conference Notes

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Google Wireless in Mountain View

Categories: Web Tools, WirelessPosted on September 11th, 2006

Yesterday, at the Mountain View Art and Wine Festival, I ran into the Google Wireless booth. For those that don’t know, Google is providing ‘free’ wireless to all of the city of Mountain View. They’ fixed routers around lamppoles all over the city. Below you can see the repeaters you can buy that will boost your signal inside your house.

Of course, I tested it out on their laptop and accessed techmeme.com with rapid speed. To me, this makes living or working in Mountain View more desirable.

More details:

Google Booth

Wireless Gear

Home Repeater

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TalkDigger Releases New Features

Categories: Social Media, Voice of the Customer, Web Marketing, Web ToolsPosted on September 5th, 2006

In July, I was part of the Talkdigger beta preview, and I left my observations on this post. Fred the founder (who wears all the hats in this solo project) of Talkdigger, just let me know that his features have released. I’ve been using Talkdigger for a while, and have encouraged others, like Thomas Hawk to use it as it aggregates many of the blog indexers. (Does that make sense? An Index Aggregator?) He’s pumped up the latest to measure ‘conversations’. Some of the key features according to Fred are:

“Find Web Conversations and discover interesting stuff
- Find web sites linking to another web site.
- See the relationship between conversations of the Web.
- Browse the Web by browsing its conversations.
- Discover interesting stuff by browsing effortlessly between
conversations.

Follow Conversations emerging around your favorite web site
- Get noticed when people say something new about a web site.
- Follow what people say about your blog, web page, etc.

Join Conversations
- Join conversations by adding your comment to the conversation.

Get in contact with new people
- Find people with same interests and get in contact with them.
- Extend your social network. “

Fred’s been working hard, I noticed he’s added the query in the URL (one of my suggestions), this one is tracking the Lunch 2.0 event that we’re hosting at Hitachi Data Systems next week. The “Related Conversations” feature seems to show incoming and outgoing links. Looks like he added a few other indexes that are being searched.

Reasons to use Talkdigger: Tune in to the Conversation

Quickly find out who’s talking about a URL (and now a conversation).
Quickly see incoming and outgoing links.
Compare and contrast results from multiple indexers (notice how each indexer serves different content)
Quickly see page rank of inbound linkers.
Great for Marketers that want to track URLs to focus/micro sites.
Great for seeing who’s linking to a specific document, or image, such as Flickr photos.

Nice job Fred, “Salutations”.

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Sneak around the Internet with Browzar

Categories: Web ToolsPosted on September 1st, 2006

Martin McKeay, Friend and ComputerWorld Blogger has had some excellent coverage on a recent browser that let’s users ’sneak’ around the internet without leaving a footprint.

“I found a new browser this morning that let’s you surf the net without leaving any footprints on the computer you’re using. Called Browzar , the browser automatically deletes any cookies and history files plus it’s small enough that it will fit on any USB key. At 264k, it downloads quickly and requires no installation, just click and go.

Now I’m a bit of a privacy freak, but this browser shouts out to me as a tool to be used by people who are doing things they shouldn’t, and this seems to be at least part of the way the developers of Browzar are advertising it. On the other hand, it’s a very lightweight browser that can be used from almost any platform quickly and easily and won’t carry much of the baggage a heavier browser like Internet Explorer or even Firefox does. If you’re a frequent road warrior who sometimes uses kiosk workstations, then this is definitely a browser you need to look at.”

I can see the use of this browser for folks that have something to hide or don’t want to be traced. But as he points out, “The police or your IT department can still discover where you’ve been by looking at your upstream traffic. “, there’s always a trace.

Edit Sept 5th: There are questions about Browzar’s validity, see TechCrunch for discussion

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Understanding Microformats for the Non-Technical Web Professional or Marketer

Categories: Mashups, Microformat, Social Media, Syndication, Web Marketing, Web Strategy, Web ToolsPosted on August 27th, 2006

I’m not a developer or software engineer.

I am an individual that needs to understand technology in order to impelement web strategies –consider the following as a public learning experience.

I first heard Marc Canter talking about Microformats a few months ago, and talked to Tantek about it at dinner –I didn’t understand it fully at the time, I’m beginning to see the value now that so many voices are appearing on the web due to blogs and social media.

I am NOT a microformat expert, if you have a suggestion or correction, please leave a comment below and I’ll update the text –let’s learn together.

Q: What are Microformats?
A new method to organize unstructured information into an organized fashion that could be used universally. Edit: You can learn more about the “Big Picture on Microformats” from John Allsopp.
Q: I’m not technical, Why should I know about Microformats?
While still in it’s very early stages, this could be a protocol that could further define RSS or make information publishing, categorizing, or managing more effective. Marketers could benefit by quickly publishing information in organized methods, consumers could quickly obtain information in organized fashions.

Q: Why Microformats?
Social Media (blogs, forums, wikis, etc) are exploding; so many voices, reviews, thoughts, and memes are being spread through the internet, a method to identify, collect, organize, and repurpose/manage will be a service to the world. So much information, very little structure.

Q: How do they work?
Since it’s not a new language, it can be embedded in HTML (as I understand it from Wikipedia) I believe that RSS can also contain the information which will be great if you need to get the word out or update information quickly. Think Vitamin has published a nifty article on embedding Microformats in HTML.

Q: What are the Benefits?
Here’s some potential benefits that come to my mind. (and this is before coffee)

Quickly find all user reviews about a product across the internet. (Imagine how powerful that becomes if you can do this from a mobile device before buying a product)
Quickly update all your contact information as it appears across the entire internet
Quickly tell the whole world about an event and have it updated on every calendar
Search engines can do a better job of indexing and serving more accurate information
Quickly put up a product to sell that would publish on many websites (ebay, Craigslist, etc)
Quickly tell the world when this price has changed or if the product is off the market (sold)
Build a universal library of all food recipes and share you own, transmit this code to your local supermarket to assemble ingredients before you arrive, or ship
Tie your disparate intranet system using RSS and Microformats as the new protocol
Quickly create a press release and send to social media tools
Quickly create an image/video and publish to be shared in other social media tools
Create your own Microformat (like HCard, or HCalendar) for your own use (see wiki)

Q: What are the Challenges?

Adoption
Blog publishing tools or widgets will need to be added
All websites that want to stay relevant will need to ‘open up’ to opensource and opendata model
Folks inputting faulty data into Microformat structure

Q: Are Microformats related to RSS?
Yes, I believe that the Microformat content can be distributed via RSS just like other content.

Interact with this post
Have a question? Leave a comment
Have an answer? Leave a comment

I’ll share the findings with the Microformats team later…

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Don’t like Wiki Syntax? –Just Double Click

Categories: Web ToolsPosted on August 25th, 2006

Brian just sent me these links to this interesting wiki. You can double click a page on the wiki to edit. Makes it easier for the novice, or for ‘what you see’ type of posting.

Double Click Wiki Editing More info here

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File Sharing Services –Data Storage to the Side

Categories: Data Storage, Web ToolsPosted on August 25th, 2006

Mike Arrington’s Techcrunch (I went to his party Friday) has a nice write up of a few file sharing companies.

“The old Napster is long gone, but was of course replaced with many other P2P networks. Today, a significant portion of Internet traffic is comprised of files being moved over bittorent, a popular and completely decentralized way of sharing files.”

Being a web guy at data storage company this is more than interesting –I’ve been thinking a lot about the decentralized storage model, and web storage clouds. Online Storage vendors will figure how to link up, share data, and disperse to rich clients (mobile, browser embedded, or to the ol TV) Check out the select four File Sharing Services:

AllPeers (which is about to go public)
Firefox plugin and peer to peer file sharing.

Zapr
Download that looks likes IM. (Google Talk has this feature, so ~~is this product still relevent?~~) (Edit: Read comments from Mick from Zapr)

Pando
Downloaded App, drag and drop folders via email address

Exaroom
Windows Download that lets users share via their MyDocuments with other users on network

Shooter7
“what friends use for privately sending photos and videos.”
Edit: Thanks Clint for this submission